


iceman cometh

by floweryfran



Series: a motley crew [11]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Harley Keener & Peter Parker Friendship, Harley Keener Needs a Hug, Harley Keener is Tony Stark's Adopted Child, Harley Keener is a Good Bro, Harley Keener-centric, Hurt Harley Keener, Iron dad and Spider son, IronDad and SpiderSon, Irondad fluff, M/M, Parent Tony Stark, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Precious Peter Parker, Protective Harley Keener, Protective Peter Parker, Protective Tony Stark, Tony Stark Acting as Harley Keener's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Tony Stark Has Trust Issues, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, iron dad and spider-son, irondad whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 10:55:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20445986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floweryfran/pseuds/floweryfran
Summary: or, 3 times Tony Stark wrongly thought Steve Rogers was trying to steal his son (and one time he was right).This all could have been avoided if Peter hadn’t insisted upon wrenching Harley out of sleep at five-twenty-three in the morning, and that is a fact that Harley would keep at the forefront of his mind as his adopted mantra for the entirety of the week to come.





	iceman cometh

**Author's Note:**

> IVE BEEN LAUGHING ABOUT THIS TITLE FOR WEEKS OKAY.
> 
> hi this is very much part of a series and reading the others first would give you more context but this one could function as a standalone as well! but, like. i recommend reading the others too if you like this one teehee
> 
> ps my kink is phonetically spelling bucky & steve’s accents, so enjoy
> 
> as soon as i finished this i ate ¼ box of brownies because i have been writing this DAILY since i posted the last chapter and just now finished it and oh my god. oh my god. it wrung me dry to write this much and bounce between fluff and angst and a lil bit of action just. AHHH! *cathartic scream* i’ve spent the past 2 weeks babysitting my younger siblings full time as my mom was on a solo vacation and now i have just finished moving into a new college today as a transfer (because my first college was too espensive) and i’m just a bundle of stress so that’s why harley is always so edgy. because i am edgy as fuck too. anywho. 
> 
> this pairing is so dumb and i love them because the dumbass energy between harley and steve is like insurmountable. i had this idea and i just HAD to write it. had to. the spirit moved me.

0  
This all could have been avoided if Peter hadn’t insisted upon wrenching Harley out of sleep at five-twenty-three in the morning, and that is a fact that Harley would keep at the forefront of his mind as his adopted mantra for the entirety of the week to come. 

At first, when Peter’s spindly little hand had snaked itself around Harley’s shoulder and mercilessly shook him, he had assumed it was more of the usual— Peter, spooked by a nightmare, searching for comfort. He reached out an arm and groped blindly in the air until he made contact with Peter’s face, grabbing it tight and squishing his cheeks. “Was jus’ a dream,” he mumbled in what he imagined to be a very comforting tone (but was really a slur of consonants so unintelligible that Peter had to restrain a surprised giggle). “Go t’ sleep.”

“No, no more sleep,” said Peter, far too loudly for the wretchedly early hour. His voice, usually as steadying as those hippie-dippy soundtracks of ocean rumbles and bird sex to Harley, grated against his ears like death metal music at Christmas Eve mass. “I need to show you something right now _right now_, Harls. You gotta get up.”

Harley, needless to say, did not get up. 

So Peter, the little bastard, climbed on top of Harley’s prone figure and sat smack in the middle of his stomach, pressing the air from his lungs in one powerful _wheeze_ and sending his limbs flying wildly like an action figure whose torso had been squeezed in a child’s dimpled fist. 

Harley whined and smacked at Peter’s thighs. “Crushing- my lungs. No- breath- gonna- die,” he gasped dramatically, rolling his eyes back to show the whites and throwing an arm over his forehead.

Peter crossed his arms over his chest, unimpressed. “Don’t go into theater. You’ll never get casted in anything, and then you’ll have to become a waiter, which you’ll also suck at because you hate people-”

“Most people,” Harley corrected, rolling his eyes to a less paranormal position to meet Peter’s gaze before flopping back into his faux-death, lolling his tongue out dramatically. 

“Most people,” Peter agreed with a tiny grin. “And you hate doing the dishes, too. I’d never hear the end of your complaining for the rest of our lives. Besides, acting would be a waste of your potential. You should be behind the stage, writing the stories.”

The Harley-corpse gave a contented hum, his stomach rolling with it and nearly bucking Peter sideways. 

“Okay, I’ve gone wildly off topic and therefore given you a few moments to reacquaint yourself with the world of the living,” Peter said. “Now you’ve really gotta wake up. We have-” he peeked at his watch. “Crap.” He slid off of Harley’s stomach and grabbed him by both wrists, pulling him up and then wrapping an arm under his shoulders, preempting the way Harley careened right back over with a forlorn groan.

With Harley’s arm over his shoulder, Peter stood, dragging both of their socked feet onto the floor with a muffled _thud_. After a moment of quick thought, he grabbed the flannel blanket off the end of the bed and wrapped it around their shoulders, the silhouette of their shadow on the ground like some lumpy, two-headed monster. Peter grinned down at it.

“Wh’re we going?” Harley mumbled, dragging his free hand over his face to try and stimulate some semblance of coherence into it.

Peter, like the goddamn jumping bean he was, started to bounce excitedly on the balls of his feet, their shadow writhing disjointedly as he moved. “It’s a surprise.”

“I hate surprises,” Harley groused, the early morning haze clearing into early morning crabbiness.

Rather than rising to the bait, Peter jabbed Harley in the gut with his elbow and pulled them out of their room. The hallway was dark and thick with the shadows of the night- Pepper’s choices in decor always somewhat erratic and high-brow and therefore shaped like things that might resemble objects only if the painter were blind and deaf and lacking the sense of touch- but it was also peaceful and silent in the way that night should be. 

It was the kind of night that Harley knew from his childhood rather than the kind he had grown accustomed to in New York; the city was just starting to stir, the volume of backfiring cars and strolling pedestrians and gabbing tourists at a hush, reminiscent of the gentle babbling of the brook one block over from the window of Harley’s childhood bedroom, or the _woosh_ of meandering cattle through the dry grass of Mrs. Next-Door’s property. 

The difference was, of course, having a Peter Benjamin to lead him bravely into the morning like a soldier into battle— as if each of Harley’s skirmishes with the sun was his first. He knew that Peter never grew tired of this- of him, dread and something heavier weighing upon his muscles until it felt like he could not _could not_ stir himself from the cradle of his sheets without being pulled, prodded and pushed- no matter how many days in a row he was the one who had to infuse some kind of potential energy into Harley’s muscles. 

Harley pined for the days when the only person who noticed when he didn’t get out of bed was his sister. She had been too young to understand why he and, sometimes, his momma, took turns becoming shadows, and she never questioned it. It was just part of their lives: the days they couldn’t get up, the days they collapsed to their knees and screamed at something she couldn’t see. If it was the former, she would climb into bed with whoever it was and fiddle around on her DS or draw pictures for them with her glittery crayons. If it was the latter, she would call for the other to come to the rescue. She always handled it with grace and acceptance, even though she never did grow to understand. She had been too young when he was around for her memory to be marred by him— a blessing among curses. 

Poppy was braver than the both of them, Harley and their momma. 

Eventually they would force themselves out of it, Harley and Charlotte, for the sake of Poppy. Charlotte needed to go to the diner, after all, to make money, and Harley went to school most days. But they ached, and they saw Mister Keener around every corner and under every bed and sitting on the living room couch and driving his black pick-up. He was always there, watching them. Daring them to get up. And, sometimes, they did. But giving in to the weight of their uneasiness was far easier. 

Harley figured that Peter knew. Peter knew it wasn’t that Harley _wasn’t a morning person_; it was bone-deep greyness, a toxin multiplying. Festering within him. There was no question of its realness. Unlike Tony, who took fifteen minutes to wake up and couldn’t say a word before espresso blistered his lips, it was not something that eased away as the minutes ticked by and the dust coated his eyelids and the blood started to stream through his veins with caffeinated fervor. No, Harley had the vitality seeped from him by something much stronger and worlds more baleful. 

But Peter knew. He understood.

And he told it _en garde!_ and raised his foil to challenge it every day. 

Peter liked to tell him that it was a team effort. Harley’s brain could wake itself. His body needed some outside help to catch up with the program. And, as well as Harley knew in his gut that this weariness was not natural born nor should it feel as comforting and intrinsic as it did, he knew in equal parts that Peter would do his best to keep it from swallowing him whole. 

That was why, this morning, even as his hands trembled and the muscles of his thighs smarted and his knees knocked together until they were sure to bruise- even as the only thing spurring him forward was the light pressure of Peter’s palm against the knobs of his spine- some hopeful ember continued to smolder warm in the pit of Harley’s stomach, sending out an orange light and casting away the looming shadows in a way Harley had never been able to do alone. 

“Did you ever realize your first and middle initials are the same as _peanut butter_? Because I did,” was what Harley said, though his heart insisted with each persistent beat for him to drop onto his unworthy knees and thank Peter, promise him everything he could give, for keeping him alive.

Peter snorted loudly, then clapped a hand over his lips to muffle his laughter, careful not to wake anyone else. “You’re a doofus,” he told Harley, lips still behind his hand. 

Harley shrugged in response, looking around and noticing Peter had pulled them into the living room, the pressure on his back leading him even as he sunk into his woeful morning mental soliloquy. _Jesus, I have to stop doing that. I end up places with no clue how I got there and someday that is going to create an issue for me_.

With a hand wrapped around Harley’s bicep, Peter pulled them to a stop. He stepped out from under their blanket cloak, letting it settle back down around Harley, who proceeded to do as any sane person would and spin around as if it were a majestic cape or a ravishing ball gown. The click of the door to the balcony opening startled him to a stop and he stumbled out of the spin as his socks slid on the hardwood. 

Peter stood with a clench-toothed grin on his face, one arm brandished outward in a _tada!_ sort of gesture. “We’re going to watch the sunrise.”

Something in Harley’s chest woke up at that, peering with half-shut eyes, curious and touched with wonder and a little bit yearning. “Yeah, we are,” he said fervently, marching straight through the door, tossing one hand out behind him to clasp around Peter’s wrist and drag him along. 

A giggle slipped from Peter’s lips, colored all the giddy pink shades of relief. 

Since returning from the island the weekend before- their skin painted golden brown and their hair streaked through with sun-stained lightness, freckles cropping up like spilt cinnamon on their noses and shoulders and along the curves of their ears- Peter had been determined to seize the remnants of their youth and hold them tight in his fists, greedy and petulant and rightfully so. They had syrup-swamped pancakes for dinner, and played a game of tag with Clint and Natasha that had ended with two sprained ankles (both Clint’s) and grass stains so deep they would never have a hope of washing out. Harley played Mario Kart or Sims while connected to Peter’s suit comm every night, giving him a play-by-play of every race and which of their Avengers Sims he was making Woohoo out of wedlock. They pranked Ned by filling his locker with plastic bugs (and Ned’s shrill shriek of terror had been entirely worth the lunch period they had to sacrifice to clean up the mess).

This felt like both a continuation and a new beginning, in a way. 

The sun rising on a new day, but that day being part of a much greater work— one book in a series where the sun rose orange and blush and lavender each morning, no matter what. Unabashed and clumsy and warm, grinning down upon all that sat below it. 

Harley wasn’t one for sap but he was one for metaphors, so as he and Peter lowered themselves onto the wrought iron balcony, legs hanging down over the edge in a freefall above the city, squinting at the stripes of color swiped across the sky, he pointed at the sun, all glorious and luminous where it peered over the ragged edges of a long, thin cloud, and said, “that’s you.”

Peter turned to him, a bemused smile on his lips. “Me?”

“_You are my sunshine_,” Harley sang under his breath, only a little sarcastic, voice thick and rumbly with morning gruffness. 

The resultant grin made Harley sure that Peter outshone everything that had ever touched the sky.

\---

“Hot chocolate?” Peter asked, almost an hour later, aimlessly shuffling through the kitchen in search of food that was ready to eat at the odious hour of _before seven a.m_. 

“Coffee,” Harley grunted in response, the excitement of the sunrise having faded from his bones and his muscles softening again with that atomic-level exhaustion. His eyelids fluttered. His fingers trembled, no matter how tightly he clenched them around his kneecaps. He was deeply, deeply cold, despite the late-May warmth seeping under the doorways and through the cracked-open windows. 

Peter looked at him evenly. Peter saw him. “Hot chocolate,” he repeated, and it rung with finality. He set about wrangling almond milk from the fridge (blatantly ignoring the note haphazardly taped to the side which claimed in chartreuse ink that it was Sam’s) and pouring a long stream of it into a pot. After setting it on a burner, he leaned against the edge of the counter and waited for it to come to a boil, his gaze locked on Harley. 

A part of Harley squirmed under Peter’s wary, purposeful care. It was awkward and limbless and wild. It was one of the many parts of himself he never wished for Peter to see, but here they were, chests sliced open and bare for each other to pick at like vultures. 

It was the part of him that despised being babied and cared for, was mortified by the idea of being seen as incapable or dependent in any way. _Peter_ made him dependent, and it was abhorrent, but somehow they were still all knotted together, shoelaces and ribbons and ropes in great loops and tangles and they were caught up in a twist somewhere along the strand. 

Peter had seen the breadth of his odiousness and still hadn’t cut that string, even though Harley had insistently shoved the scissors at him more times than he could count.

It was trust, the most important tie that bound them together, that named them brothers, that forged some warm, unwavering alliance that they called _love_. Peter _trusted_ that Harley’s good parts always always always outweighed the bad ones; Harley _trusted_ that Peter was just courageous and stubborn and gentle enough to pluck the good parts from the bad and protect them, shoving the bad ones into some dark corner between his ribs and bringing the good ones up to the forefront like the window display of a shop at Christmas. 

The sharp sound of a mug coming down on the countertop startled Harley out of his reverie. He blinked hard and looked up to meet Peter’s gaze, feeling rather guilty that Peter wasn’t mad at him, despite his constant inability to function like a human. Peter, who had every reason to be frustrated at him and more. It was unfair how good he was. 

Uncertain, Harley reached out a hand to Peter. A sad smile quirked on Peter’s lips, and he knotted their fingers together. Tentatively, he brushed his thumb over Harley’s knuckles. Everything was feathers and eggshells. Harley took a sip of his drink, mostly to appease Peter. He set it down too loudly and they both winced.

Then— an alarm rang on Peter’s phone, shattering that thin, persistent quietness in one round of that awful old-fashioned car horn honk. Harley jumped so hard that he nearly tipped backwards off of his stool and was only kept upright by Peter’s tight grip on his hand as they both howled with laughter. 

“Your- face-” Peter wheezed, clapping his free hand down on the counter, entire body shuddering with the force of his mirth.

“Just. Take your- take your-” Harley cut off, overcome with another wave of breathless laughter. Instead of trying to speak, he rose and crossed the kitchen without even thinking about how monumentous it was for him to _stand_ and _move_ without being asked to, grabbing the little plastic bottle of gummy pills and chucking it at Peter’s head, still chortling as Peter caught it with one hand. He followed it with the bottle of iron supplements Peter had been taking for the newfound deficiency that had him wobbling on his feet after a recent patrol went horribly wrong and he ended up with a chunk of his shoulder gouged out by a jackhammer. Tony making jokes about him being the best iron supplement and planting a flurry of kisses on Peter’s head only went so far when his blood- much of which had exited his body in a horrifying geyser- was still acclimating to existing, and stuff. So Peter took the pills, and his blood figured out how to be blood.

Peter unscrewed the first bottle and popped two T-Rex tranquilizers between his giggles. He shook another two pills out of the second bottle and swallowed them dry with a great _gulp_ just as Harley returned to his seat. 

“Y’know,” Harley said, feeling strangely invigorated by Peter’s laughter. “That is my least favorite thing you do.”

“What? Take my meds? Take the iron pills so I don’t _faint on you_ while we’re _standing at the edge of the subway platform_ again?”

“No, you- dumbass,” Harley rolled his eyes and pushed his mug over to Peter. “Swallowing pills dry. It gives me the heebie jeebies.”

“Your face gives me the heebie jeebies.”

“Your _mom_ gives me the heebie jeebies.”

Peter mimed a great sniffle, wiping his hand under his nose. “What a senseless joke to make at the expense of a poor orphan lad.”

Harley scoffed so aggressively that it stung his throat, throwing his arms in the air in acquiescence. He let them flop onto the counter and planted his head down atop them.

It was then that there came a quiet knock upon the doorway of the kitchen. The two squinted in the half-light to make out who it was, but realized by their hulking stature there was only one tower resident it could have been.

“Didn’t expect anyone else to be awake this early,” said Steve Rogers amusedly. 

“Peter woke me up at the asscrack of dawn so we could watch the sunrise,” Harley intoned, already returned to the curl of his arms. 

Steve raised his eyebrows. “That sounds nice. Was it beautiful today?”

“It’s beautiful everyday,” said Peter, earnest as ever, before taking a big slurp of Harley’s hot chocolate. 

The grin Steve sent to Peter was soft. “Good to hear.” 

Trust Peter to make Captain America soft. Jesus H. Christ.

As Steve rustled around in the cupboard for granola and all sorts of nuts and seeds, he said something so terrifying that Harley wanted to retreat into his t-shirt and never come back out. 

“Since you’re here, I was thinking,” started Steve, turning to lean his back against the counter and look at the boys head-on. From that new angle, the redness in his cheeks was fierce. “Now, you don’t have to say yes, but I hadda’ idea and I was wondering if one a’ you could help a fella out.” He scratched at his eyebrow. “Sam has been making fun of me for what he calls my _grandpa wardrobe_-” the boys knew this, as they had already heard Sam saying that Steve looked like his _Great Uncle Bernard, if he were white and had the fashion sense of an uncooked Thumann’s hot dog_\- “and I was planning on going shopping for some new clothes, but I just haven’t got the eye for it. D’you think you might want to take an old man shopping? It wouldn’t have to be a full day thing, just an hour or two, and I’ll pay the bus fare and throw a meal in there, or whatever you need.” Steve’s blush was furiously red. “I’m just a little desperate, y’see, and want to get it over with. And you guys always dress real nice-” Harley shot eyes at Peter, picturing his stupid, endearing pun t-shirts and wondering how Steve could possibly call them _nice_\- “so I trust your opinions.”

There was a brief moment post-oration where the world was the most quiet it had ever been, ever, in all of human history. The kind of quiet that presses on your eardrums and makes everything heavy and slow-motion.

“I’ll take you,” said Harley suddenly, though his every muscle and marrow whined for him to burrow into his hiding spot between the washing machine and the drier and sleep the day away there. _??? What the fuck, Harley_, said his brain.

Peter shot him a scrutinizing look, as if he were thinking the same thing. 

He shot what he hoped was a reassuring smile at Peter and then a second one to Steve, his chest feeling awfully mushy as he took in Steve’s wide-eyed and pink-cheeked look of awed gratitude. 

“_Thanks_, pal,” said Steve. “Real lucky I bumped into you guys, huh?” he said, nearly bouncing on his heels as he jaunted from the room with a new kind of spring in his step. 

Peter turned to Harley. “This just in,” he said, pressing one finger over his ear as if listening to a message on an earpiece. “Captain America is actually a puppy in a scary man body. I repeat, Captain America is a puppy in a scary man body.”

Harley’s shoulders jumped up to his ears. He was- unhelpfully- remembering quite clearly the _fuck Steve Rogers, but also_ fuck _Steve Rogers_ incident from the Halfoween party. After a moment, Peter, by the mercy of their unofficial-official mind meld, remembering the same moment, had to muffle his snickers behind his hand.

“I am so screwed,” Harley said forlornly into his hot chocolate.

\---

i  
“Y’know,” said Harley, sucking a loud slurp of orange soda through a metal straw and tilting his head to the side, appraising. “I don’t hate it.”

“But it isn’t right either,” said Steve dryly, more of a statement than a question, twisting himself before the mirror to see how the frighteningly skinny jeans hugged his ass.

“Don’t go looking for something that isn’t there, Cap,” Harley deadpanned, gesturing with an elbow towards Steve’s unfortunate lack of voluptuous badunkadunk. Harley wondered if the serum had been flawed when it took to Steve: if he were _truly_ the perfect man, then he would have something more to show for it in the rear department. 

With a sigh, Harley sank further against the round display table he was sitting on, burrowing between a graphic tee with sloths and some nauseating vest thing that brought to mind Beetlejuice’s wedding suit.

Steve flipped him the bird and disappeared into the changing room.

Harley dropped his head between his knees. There was a migraine building behind his eyes and a wave of nausea rolling in his stomach and he couldn’t figure out why. A mold allergy aggravated by the old clothing that surrounded them? Too much sugar from the soda? The warning signs of an onslaught of mental cacophony that would cause him to rip the clothing-laden shelves off the walls one by one like teeth from a toddler’s mouth and then take a lap around a Monopoly board _no I will not pass go and collect two-hundred_ and bury himself along Illinois Avenue?

Harley sighed and murmured, quietly enough so that even Steve couldn’t hear, “I’m losing my marbles.”

Three hours in the back corner of a Salvation Army would do that to you.

The sound of the metal curtain loops scraping against the rod startled Harley, his gaze snapping up to see Steve peeking out at him, all wide eyes and pink cheeks and his body hidden behind the curtain.

“I think I picked everything I wanna get,” said Steve’s disembodied head.

Harley flicked his eyebrows. “Yeah? That’s awesome, Cap. You want to show me?”

Steve hummed his assent, slinking around the curtain. He had donned a pair of joggers in a thick black khaki material that Harley approved of because they were not tac pants. (Essentially the only requirements for the outfits purchased that day- as imposed by Harley and, more importantly, Bucky- were that they were not 1. red, white, or blue spandex, nor 2. tactical gear.) Atop them was a white t-shirt and overlarge denim jacket combination that made Harley’s gay detectors start screaming, but, like, in a good way. 

“Wow,” commented Harley, which was the most positive reaction Steve had gotten from him all afternoon.

Steve’s face split into a big, soppy grin. “You like it? I feel like that kid that’s always putting the screws on you and Pete— what’s his name again?”

It took Harley a long moment of deducing context clues to figure out what the everloving hell that meant. “Oh! Oh, you mean Flash. Yeah, he’s a prick and he definitely wears outfits like that. But you can be sure he thinks his balls are _way_ too big to be buying it at the Salvation Army.”

“His loss,” said Steve emphatically, brushing his hands down the worn denim of his jacket lovingly.

Harley _hmph_ed in agreement. “Got anything else to show me, old man?”

“Yes!” Steve said, lighting up like Christmas candles in foggy windows and rushing back into the changing room.

“A puppy, I tell you,” Harley muttered, shaking his head and pulling another sip of soda. “A goddamn puppy.”

It was only another fifteen minutes before they left the store, Steve’s elbows laden with overstuffed plastic bags of sweaters and denim and fashionable sneakers but his pockets only twenty dollars lighter. “It’s almost like shopping back in the old days,” Steve was waxing on as they walked, a bounce in his step, the bags hitting Harley in the arm as they swung. “Not quite as cheap as then, but it’s the closest thing to normal I’ve found yet! Not that Bucky and I were buying all that much clothing back then. We were kinda like you and Pete,” he said, “even though we were real different sizes, our closets got all morphed together and we wore each—“ Steve suddenly cut off, his head snapping up and eyes narrowing like a dog that smelled a squirrel. “I hear something,” he said, quiet. 

Harley’s heart dropped. “Like, a _parade_ something? Or a _crime_ something? I’ve been friends with Peter long enough to realize you heroic-types don’t make that distinction until you’re asked.”

“Yeah, we like the drama of it,” Steve breathed, unfocused, cocking his head in what Harley assumed was the direction of the sound.

Harley listened hard, trying to catch heads or tails of whatever it was. All he heard was the gentle whistle of the summer breeze as it blew the traffic lights and the squealing of cars breaking and the shuffle of footsteps and the constant muttering that hovered somewhere above the natural city throng at all hours. Nothing out of the usual. 

“You’re makin’ me nervous, Steve,” Harley said tightly, clenching his hands into fists erratically.

There was another moment of city silence before Steve straightened up, shoulders back and chin high, a smooth mask of confidence stiffening the curve of his lip and the sharp line of his brow bone. This was not Steve Rogers. This was Captain I-bleed-red-white-and-blue America. “Third door in front of us on the right, chipped blue paint. I can hear dogs back there, sound like they’re _whining_-” the mask broke for a moment as he looked at Harley, “I’d know, Buck musta’ tried to save all the emaciated mutts in Brooklyn between the ages of ten and eighteen-” and he was upright again, a frown on his lips. “They’re definitely injured. There are at least four men in there, I can’t hear it all but it sounds like they’re bettin’ on- yup. That is definitely a dog-fighting business. I count six different dogs in there, smells like sweat and— blood.” He turned to Harley, whose heart was thrumming painfully against his ribs, terror stinging as it raced through his veins like poison. Harley had read enough news articles about dog fighting rings to know what type of deal was back there. Broken. Broken. Those poor dogs were broken. Harley had the sudden, wild urge to fix it. 

“Four guys, six dogs.” A glint in Steve’s eye. “How do we feel about delivering some justice today, Private Keener?”

It was almost as if Steve had read his mind. Harley stood straighter quite suddenly, his heels clicking together, never more terrified yet prepared to do anything in his life. He pressed two fingers to his forehead in a salute. “_Dude_. Duh.”

Steve cocked an eyebrow, a smile spreading slow on his lips. 

“Uh, I mean. Yes. Sir. Yes, sir. What do you guys even say in the army?”

A laugh tumbled from Steve almost like an accident. “_Yes, Steve_ works plenty for me, son. You gotta plan?” 

And he seemed serious. As if he were asking _Harley_, a clueless, scared-outta-his-wits kid for help. “Uh, Steve? I’m not- Peter. I have no experience with something like this.”

Steve stared calmly into his eyes. “Aren’t you the one on Peter’s comms every night, watching his moves and making sure he gets home okay?” Harley ignored the stutter in his chest over learning that his covert connection with Peter was not as covert as they had thought. “Harley, there is no civilian who has as much experience as you. You’ve seen Peter make mistakes and you’ve seen him do great things. You know what works and what doesn’t. So, what’s gonna work? Your call.”

Harley’s heart continued to pound, but his hands didn’t shake. No matter what he wanted to tell himself, Steve was- right? Steve was _right_. He saw everything Peter did. There were tactics he knew by heart, Peter’s step-by-step moves ingrained into the eye of his mind until he dreamt them. The huff of Peter’s breath as he dodged a punch, the soft _thwip_ of his webshooters slinging out a gob of the sticky stuff. He knew how to pick locks, how to force windows open, how to distract a criminal with snark and catch him when he was too distracted by his mouth to notice his hands. 

He hated this. He hated it. He was going to fuck it up and the dogs would end up even more hurt there would be lives on the line blood on his hands and it would be _his fault he ruined everything always_-

No. He could do this. 

So it was under his command that Steve, ringing all the righteous sounds of vengeance, kicked down the door, while Harley snuck in the first floor window, ready to round up the dogs so they could be escorted to their freedom. 

It was also under Harley’s command that the police came and brought _them, too_, to the station, under the grounds of trespassing on private property and the destruction of said property without a warrant. 

Apparently kicking down a door and breaking a window lock were not justified acts of vandalism, even when they resulted in six beautiful and wild-hearted and horrifyingly disfigured dogs being brought to an adoption center to find their forever homes. 

Looking at them had torn something in Harley, and he sat in the plastic chair reserved for him in the lobby of the police station with his forehead heavy in his hands. He didn’t regret what he and Steve did— not for a second. He wasn’t upset that they were in trouble, wasn’t afraid of the fact that Tony would be furious with him for doing something potentially dangerous without calling him for help. He wasn’t even frustrated that Steve had chosen to call Bucky with their one phone call, knowing that he was about to come pick them up in his ugly blue truck and embarrass the living daylights out of them by blasting old Nicki Minaj with the windows down for the entire ride back to the tower. 

(Because, that’s right. They had to be signed out of the goddamn police station like kids from school after puking in the nurse's office.)

That wasn’t what sat in his stomach, chalky and painfully hard as a cinder block. No, it was looking into the eyes of the dogs as he slipped into the window behind the backs of the criminals- watching them skitter backwards against the wall in terror, chains clattering around their necks and their spines trembling in their desperate fit to get as far away from Harley as possible- and seeing a ghost of himself. 

He looked at them and he was five, curled in a ball under Poppy’s crib, his tiny hand pressed over her mouth to muffle her cries so that their father, stumbling upstairs with footfalls that echoed like thunder and shook the very walls around them, wouldn’t be able to find them. 

It was one of the moments he still dreamed about on the worst nights. 

The idea of anyone, anything feeling that type of paralyzing, nauseating, all-encompassing fear for any reason at all was enough for him to immediately understand Peter’s choice of, uh, extra-curricular, and reconcile any selfish qualms he had ever had about it. 

If he could help, he should. 

In that moment, Harley was about ready to build a suit for his goddamn self and go fly out with Peter on patrol every night, powers or serum be damned. 

It was choking, tightening his throat as if it were locked in one big fist, unyielding and merciless, and he smashed the bases of his palms into his eyes, pressing until it hurt so that he wouldn’t have to keep _thinking_. 

Those dogs looked so human. Their eyes held multitudes. Universes. They were so wise, weathered. So bone-rattlingly scared. There had been no one to help them, no one, they were trapped, tied to the wall, shivering under the bed with Poppy crying into his collarbone, all snot and salty tears staining the shoulder of his bed shirt, the house eerily quiet save for the soles of steel-toed work boots coming down hard on creaky wooden stairs—

But this wasn’t about him. _It wasn't_, he assured himself, except it was. Because how could he leave another innocent creature to be broken down to splinters if he could help it?

Harley ached. 

Steve fell hard into the seat beside him with a sigh. 

Harley startled, his fingers immediately beginning to tremble with nerves, fumbling forward to adjust his shoelaces just to give himself something to do other than look at the man he had an uncomfortably new respect for. 

Screw war hero, self-sacrificial actions or whatever. This was the type of man that made it his God-given duty to save tortured dogs when any normal person would have ignored them. And _that_ was why Harley looked up to him. 

So Harley was colored silver and surprised when the first words Steve chose to say were “what’s your motivation, son?”

“Huh?” said Harley, still faking investment in tying his shoelaces.

“What made you so sure that you wanted to help those dogs?”

Harley looked up at Steve incredulously, dwarfed by the man even as he sat beside him but not at all frightened of him. Not anymore. He pushed himself up in his seat, shoving his hands into his pockets. He tasted the words on his tongue before letting them free. “If I have the opportunity to help someone out, then that means I have the duty to help them,” he said, wiping the clammy sweat from his palms onto the inside of his pockets and hoping that Steve didn’t notice the way he danced around answering the question directly. “I don’t want people to think of me-” he cut off. “_I_ don’t want to think of myself as someone who would ignore someone else in need. Whether it’s a person or a bunch of tortured dogs… same difference, really. And, I mean, I just know that if it were me… well. There have been a lot of times in my life where I wished Captain America and his trusty sidekick Hillbilly Boy would kick down my door and carry me off to safety, is all.”

Steve appraised him, a sad albeit fond smile curling his lips. There was something there, some higher level of understanding that surprised Harley. He thought he didn’t know Steve, but today he had come to see past the mask— or the cowl, or whatever. Maybe Steve had seen something, too, more than just the sarcastic prick of a kid who wasn’t afraid to call him out for his asslessness or bad taste in cardigans. That thought made some long-silent part of him sing. 

“You’ve gotta lotta heart, kid. Y’know if you ever do need someone to kick down your door and save you nowadays- or even just someone to lend an ear sometimes- I’m your guy.” 

So Steve did see him dance around the question. Guy was more perceptive than Harley had accounted for. The truth sat clumsy and lilting at the tip of his tongue- _I looked at those dogs and saw myself cowering from the man that was supposed to love me because I hadn’t known any better at the time and there was no way for them to know that their pain wasn’t love_\- but he swallowed it down in one hearty gulp. No use opening old wounds. Besides. Only Peter, Tony, and Pepper knew about that. Steve wasn’t quite worthy of that yet. He had to goddamn earn it. 

“Well, Peter’s my guy,” said Harley. “But if I ever need someone and Pete, Tony, and Pepper are all out of commission… you’ll be chalked onto the list in spot number four.”

A sweet chuckle came pouring out of Steve, much lighter than Harley would think could come out of such a galumphing man. “It’s an honor to be considered for your list at all.”

“Not to be a bluenose,” came a drawled voice from the hallway, “but the party is over for you, trouble boys.”

Steve winced, and their moment broke. “Hey, Buck.”

“Hey yourself,” Bucky said, moving to stand right in front of Steve’s seat, arms crossed over his chest and face carefully free of judgement. “So, imagine this: I’m mindin’ my own business, baking some muffins with Sam, when my cell phone rings. Now, I think to myself, who could possibly be calling me? Steve is with the kid, Sam is right here, Pete went home to May. Everyone in the tower just yells into the vents so their voice carries if we need each other. So I check it. And it’s a number I don’t know. Now, this is where the plot thickens, because no telemarketer numbers or butt dials should be able to contact my cell phone, Stevie, because it’s all encoded and private. I have Sam pick it up because I’ve got flour all over my hands, and, whaddya’ know, he says it’s the goddamn _police_, and they’re saying they’ve got Steve Rogers and a kid there, and the two of them need to be escorted from the premises, please, and would you come soon because Captain Rogers won’t stop bellyaching to us about _justice_ and _the infringement of Constitutional rights_-” Bucky punctuated those words by poking Steve hard in the chest- “and we’re getting real tired of hearing it. So this is it, Stevie: what did Captain America do that was so horribly unlawful that a copper scrounged up the nerve to take _you, Mister Liberty and Justice and Lawlessness_, to the police station? It better be moreova’ story than that time in ‘thirty-five when you got pinched for trespassing on your goddamn news route to sell to the Sankowski’s nanny.”

Steve balked. “Well, Buck.” He chuckled uneasily. “Thing is, ironically enough, we did get busted for trespassing and, uh, some damaged property-”

Bucky’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly, dangerously. 

“But it was for a real good cause!” he hastened to add. 

Bucky’s gaze slipped to Harley, softening slightly when he met Harley’s haunted gaze. 

“I told him we should do it,” Harley said quietly. “We accidentally found a dog fighting ring when we were store-hopping and I-” Harley nearly choked, and when he continued, his voice wavered. “We just couldn’t leave them all chained up in there with those men beating the shit out of them and doing- who knows what else to ‘em. It wouldn’t have been right. No one else was going to help them. We had to, Bucky,” he whispered. “We just had to.”

Bucky shifted his weight, silent for a long moment. It was obvious that he just wanted to make them squirm. “Alright,” he said, uncrossing his arms with a sigh. “That, I can get behind. You’re forgiven.”

Steve’s lip quirked in a half-smile. “Jeez, Buck, you’ve gone soft in your old age. You never woulda’ let it drop that quickly in the thirties.”

Bucky shrugged. “I’ve been told that Nazis turning your head into vanilla pudding and then having secret African genius children sculpt it back into brain matter can do that to you.” Bucky turned back to Harley then. Earnestly, he said, “and— don’t think we don’t see through you, pal.”

Harley started. “Uh, what?”

“Every hero has an origin story,” Bucky said simply. “Something changed you and made you selfless and brave enough to want to do this thing, consequences be damned. Tony got abducted, Tasha went rogue from the Red Room, Bruce and the-“ he wiggled his fingers, “-radiation. Whatever it may be, it made you deliver one helluva rousing speech about duty a minute ago. We all got hurt in our lives, and I just want to remind you that we’re all stewing in our misery together.”

Harley blinked. “I, uh. I’m really thinking that this was a one time type of thing. In fact, I think I’m going to be grounded in my bedroom with the door locked until I’m forty-nine and wrinkly. I’m not a hero.”

Steve frowned at him. “All that talk about commiserating and you picked _that_ part of the speech to get hung up on?”

“Hey,” Harley said defensively, raising his hands in surrender. “A lot is happening and I don’t know _what_ is important right now; I hardly even know which way is up.” The remnants of tremors were writhing in his fingers, like the last reverberations of a gong. 

Something in them seemed to soften as they noticed it- how could they _forget, he was still a boy_\- the tension seeping out of their shoulders until they were slumped. Like normal men. Not soldiers. 

Like Harley. 

“All I’m saying is that we know a lot about pain, son,” Steve said solemnly. A small spark seemed to light in his eyes as he continued, a conspiratory quirk to his lips. “I met Bucky when I was six and he was seven, and we were— inseparable. Until I was the ripe age of 17, and he left me all on my lonesome-“

“Steve, are you still goin’ with this? I got a _job_ at the _docks_ to pay for your _medicine_-“

“And he was back for a while after that, but left me again only two years later-“

“I got _drafted into the army_-“

“And then,” he said in a long-suffering sort of tone, and Harley identified that spark in his eye to be _mischief_, the sneaky bastard, “after I fought tooth and nail and torturous, painful serum to get back to him, he had the nerve to be _dead_-“

“_Captured and tortured as a prisoner of war_-“

“And then the mook came back, _again_. Ho, ho, but then he went and died a _second_ time, didncha’, Buck, because once just wasn’t enough-“

“_I’m gonna kick your ass to Hoboken_-“

“And then _I_ went and died- was tired of all the back and forth, yeah, you heard me, make up your damn mind, James Buchanan- and, well, you know the rest,” Steve finished with a noncommittal wave of one of his garbage-can-lid sized hands. “What I’m tryna’ say is, we’re no strangers to grief and mourning, so if you ever wanna talk about it to someone older and wiser, we’re your guys.” 

“Steve,” Bucky said dryly, rubbing the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger in a surprisingly Tony move. “When have we ever been wise.” It was a statement, more than a question. “I think that fairy tale just proved that we have never once been wise, not a day in our sorry lives.”

Steve shrugged, and that was enough for them.

It was not enough, however, for Tony, who threw a massive stink when he learned that Steve had taken his kid for the entire day without asking first and had, in that time, almost turned him into a convicted felon. 

“You have a frightening lack of self preservation skills, squirt,” he snapped at Harley, the frustration leaking into his tone a shoddy cover for the worry that was turning him all the cool shades of cloudy-sky blue. He shook Harley a little by the shoulder. “Okay, class, repeat after me. _Steve is a bad influence and I will not follow him into the jaws of death_. Steve is a bad- why aren’t you repeating after me, class?”

“Because I like Steve,” Harley said crossly, a suitably chagrined Steve letting out a subsequent aww. “And your definition of the _jaws of death_ is so loose that I’ll never be able to see him again if I agree.”

A muscle in Tony’s jaw jumped. “Are you trying to cradle snatch, Rogers? Because that might just be our next world-shaking argument if you are—”

“Oh, _God_, no,” Steve said with a snort. “I’m perfectly fine being distant Uncle Steve. I don’t want him forever; a few awkward days on the town eating a disproportionately large amount of junk food is plenty for me. I would never steal your kid, Tony.”

Harley nodded his approval of that statement. “You’re dad. No one else is gonna be dad,” he said in a voice just too amused to be soothing. 

Tony rubbed his left arm as if massaging out a pain. “I’m watching you, Rogers,” he said, pointing two fingers at his eyes and then towards Steve. “You get my kid arrested and you throw hands with me, _capisci_?”

“Capache,” Steve answered, a little amused and very uninformed as to the mechanics of Italian verb conjugations. 

Tony sighed and dropped his forehead into his hand. This was the start of a whole new phase of _stupid_; he could just feel it.

ii  
Harley wasn’t exactly sure how it happened, in all honesty. All he knew was that he was now sitting cross-legged on the tarp covered floor of Steve Rogers’s art studio, on Steve Rogers’s floor of the tower, before a blank canvas the size of a throw blanket, with red and orange paint smeared at the tip of the paintbrush dangling from between his fingers, and absolutely no idea what it was that he should be painting. 

Steve wasn’t even looking at him. He was just sort of— there, across the room, perched like a cat in his bay-window seat with a sketch pad in his lap and charcoal smudged along the side of his left hand as it sent his pencil dancing lithely across the paper. 

The sun shone through the window onto Steve, making his hair gleam a ferocious orange and his pale skin see-through with a golden glow like papyrus in front of a fire. It was pretty. Harley thought, for a moment, that he might paint it. 

Then he said, _fuck_ that, that’s creepy, and set back off to thinking. 

The jagged city skyline was cliche. Painting Poppy would make him miss her more. He remembered the grass fields of Rose Hill like he remembered the scars on his knees from childhood falls— that is to say, too well. He wouldn’t paint them. 

A scene from their recent vacation— the moon reflecting off the water, all of his friends kicking up sand and guzzling wine the way a college kid drinks NyQuil the night before an exam? 

Peter, returned bruised and bloody and heroic from a patrol, a dazzling but exhausted grin on his face? 

A forest scape with cloud-brushing pine trees in deep greens and blacks?

Nothing felt right. 

Staring at a blank canvas held a tension; the weight of expectations settled in the inches between where his brush hovered and where the surface awaited its kiss with bated breath. The air was stiff with anticipation. 

Harley stretched his elbow, scratched his eyebrow with the back end of the paintbrush. 

He huffed out a sigh, then another, more self-indulgent and whiny than the first. 

“Ugh,” he said. “_Uuughhhh. Uuuuuuugggghhhh_.”

“Eloquent,” commented Steve as he brushed eraser shavings from his paper. 

“Ugh.”

“Can’t think of anything to paint?”

“Ugh.”

“You’ve got a whole world of options. It can be a lot.”

“Ugh.”

A pause. “Want me to turn on some music?”

Harley shrugged. A great gob of paint flung off of the paintbrush and he contorted frantically to make sure it hit the tarp rather than the canvas. He blew a sharp sigh from his nose and turned to Steve. “Yeah, maybe music will help. I’m, like, losing my mind over here.”

Steve chuckled under his breath as he rose to his feet, crossing to the restored gramophone standing sentinel on an end table in the corner, far from the wet paint, long-dry canvases balanced against it. “Isn’t it a little early in the day to be losing your mind?”

“Can’t be early in the day if you never went to sleep,” said Harley, aiming for a joke but falling far flat as his voice caught in his throat. 

Steve looked to Harley over his shoulder as he sifted through record sleeves. “Long night, then?”

Harley rested his paintbrush on the tarp. “I don’t remember the last time a night _wasn’t_ long.”

Steve slid a record onto the turntable and Fred Astaire began to croon _Cheek to Cheek_, the volume low, the sound crackly. He closed his eyes lightly, eyelids fluttering in satisfaction, before crossing the room and sitting cross-legged in front of Harley, the canvas between them. “Something on your mind?”

Harley ghosted his fingers over the blank canvas and shrugged. “For a while now, yeah.”

“Thought so. You’ve been…” Steve paused, waving a palm noncommittally, as if testing what he could say. Harley flicked up a brow, as if inviting Steve to go on. “You’ve been lookin’ bone-tired,” Steve said. 

“I am,” Harley said. “I am. I am.”

“Maybe you can paint the thing out of your head then?”

“How do I do that?” 

Steve looked at him softly. “Summon the thing in your mind. Don’t let it fill you up, but hold it in your chest. Don’t let it sway you. Then pick up the brush, and imagine that every stroke of paint on the canvas is a whisper of it streaming out of you. When the picture is done, the thing that was bothering you is gone, too.”

Harley’s gaze never wavered from Steve, locked on every word as if it were gospel. “And that works?”

Steve raised one shoulder in a lopsided shrug. “It has for me.”

“Yeah?”

Steve chewed his lip for a moment, then leaned backwards and grabbed a few of the canvases from where they rested against the gramophone. He set them before Harley side by side, like one extended terror scene, square upon square of forests aflame and crashing planes and ice and snow and hands fisted around dilapidated train tracks. Crimson bootprints in a white expanse, a pair of too-blue eyes over the edge of a mask, a knife buried in a shoulder up to the hilt. Bullets glimmering under slanted moonlight, smoldering towns, six men with empty plates and full glasses and eyes teeming with life. A wound wrapped in a stained bandage. An iron suit, crinkled from blunt force. Clint with an arm hanging loose over the edge of a gurney. Bucky, all over, wielding weapons and smiles and loaves of bread and tubing green with oxidation, with long hair and slicked curls and a high-and-tight with blood on his forehead. 

And, more often than not, death. Grey death freezing Natasha’s smirk, or Tony’s worried frown, or Thor’s thundering laugh. 

In one, Peter, lying crooked and bloody on the pavement.

Harley’s stomach turned. “They’re… beautiful. God.”

“Yeah?” said Steve.

“I hate them,” Harley said quietly. “They’re brilliant. I hate them.”

“Me too,” said Steve, a little breathless. He collected them with shaky palms and stacked them back against the gramophone, faced away from them.

Harley picked up the paintbrush once again and swiped a long, jagged and unforgiving stripe across the entire canvas, end to end. 

“Good,” said Steve violently, as he struggled to his feet and wobbled back to his seat in the window, breaths heavy as he began to sketch again. “That’s- exactly it. Keep doing that.”

Harley did. He dipped haphazardly into blues and greens and striped cerulean parallel to the red. He swirled into a deep purple and painted rings. Each stroke was a strand of something acrid being pulled from his veins, leaving him empty and sagging like a gutted stuffed animal.

Something was burning in his chest. He hunched over, trying to ease the pain, and found no relief. He puffed out a breath and raked his fingers through his hair. He needed something to fill the void that expelling his nightmares was creating. Without them, he had absolutely nothing left. 

“Steve, what did you do in your free time back in the dinosaur era?”

Steve answered without looking up. “I ran odd jobs at the grocery that wouldn’t upset my lungs. Sold newspapers. I drew. Watched baseball with Buck.”

That, at least, was something Harley knew. “Who was your team?”

“Brooklyn Dodgers.”

“You hear they’re in L.A. these days?”

Steve’s gaze snapped up, a blank, horrified look in his eyes. “Treason.”

Harley almost laughed. “Yanks are best in the business now, though.”

Steve scowled, scratching a particularly firm line into his drawing. “I’m a Dodgers guy through and through. Whole neighborhood was, back then. Anyone who liked the Yanks was really cheesin’ it in public, just pretending to like the Dodgers. You’d get your ass beat for bein’ a Yank ten blocks in any direction.”

The record started scratching as the album ended. Harley rose before Steve could and returned it to its slip, trading it out for Billie Holiday’s eponymous album, side B.

_Autumn in New York_. One of his all-time favorites.

He murmured along with the song as Steve slipped into silence, moving back towards his painting. Some of the doubtless purpose of his brushstrokes had melted away, some of the sudden strike of painful anxiety from earlier mellowing out into a quiet hum. That was manageable. So he plucked up his brush and began swiping white streaks all around the intersections of the drying colors. 

“_Autumn in New York… it’s good to live it again_,” Harley murmured, feeling the gruffness of his vibrato in his throat and wishing, for a moment, that he had kept up singing since moving to the city. 

“You a singer?” Steve asked, startling Harley. The full-body twitch of fear caused him to splash a rich green paint that speckled the entirety of the canvas. He squinted at it and tilted his head, deciding he liked it. 

“Used to sing a little. I play guitar and a bit of piano, too,” he said, adding a few more erratic green specks. 

Steve, looking as if he, too, had calmed down from whatever rift looking at his paintings had opened in his chest, smiled slightly. “Why didncha’ ever tell any of us? That’s real cool, kid.”

Harley shrugged. “Didn’t think it was important.”

Steve said, “well, what else are you holdin’ out on us on account of it being _unimportant_?”

Harley flicked his eyebrows up, as if to ask _are we really doing this right now_?

In no way did Steve back down, so Harley offered, “I’m a writer. I’ve been writing for… as long as I can remember. Since I was a kid.”

“A science guy _and_ an art guy, huh? Whaddya’ write about?”

For a moment, Harley considered lying. In no world did he want to tell Steve that he wrote about strangers, gave them extraordinary lives to distract from his own mediocre one. But he knew, at the same time, that there was no reason for him to lie to Steve about anything. Steve, who was sharing his paints and his sacred space for no reason other than that he wanted to help Harley find something new to love. Steve, who ruthlessly fought to kick his ass in Mario Kart and never won but never stopped trying because he knew it made Harley laugh. Steve, who trusted him to formulate a plan solid enough to save the lives of six tortured dogs. 

“I write stories, mostly, about the exceptional.” He looked up and met Steve’s open gaze. “Sometimes I wish I could live in them.”

Steve gave him a solemn half-smile. “We all wanna live somewhere else, more often than not. It’s normal. But we need to find the exceptional parts of our own lives and live for those moments.”

“I know,” Harley said quietly. “Still kinda sucks.”

“Still mega-sucks,” said Steve empathetically. 

And, for some reason, the combination of Steve’s big, broad, goofy face, wild brows and prominent nose and all, and the word _mega-sucks_, set Harley off until he was wheezing with laughter. It felt like release, it pealed like bells, as if marking the end of a long, painful moment and the dawn of a lighter one. And it was Steve who brought him there. And for that, he grinned.

The door opened swiftly, bouncing off the wall with a low _thud_. 

In the doorway stood Tony, eyes wide and frazzled and shoulders stiff as to be carved of stone. 

When he saw Harley there, balled on the floor with red paint smeared across his cheekbone and green in his hair and Steve across the room looking at him with unparalleled fondness in his eyes, something in his chest splintered, became sharp. Thumb tacks and barbed wire and stomach acid and— ferocious, relentless jealousy, striking him like a flechette right to the soft, sunken, vulnerable part of his chest where the arc had once sat and where a great circle of vibranium had once shattered bone. He felt the color drain from his cheeks, the words that had been poised on his tongue- _there you are, thank goodness, I couldn’t find you for hours, I feared the worst, I thought you were gone_\- melting into nothing, the taste of them a memory.

He turned on his heel and left before he could do something stupid, like yell, or grab Harley by the shoulder and pull him from the room, or cry.

There was no reason for him to be jealous. None at all. It wasn’t his business if his kid snuck off before he or Peter had woken up without letting either of them know where he had gone; none of his business if, even though he had forgiven him- of course he had, even if he pretended he didn’t because he was bone-achingly terrified- he feared Steve like he feared aging: it was something he would inevitably fall victim to, and no matter how often people told him to embrace it and make the best of it, it was debilitating and horribly painful nonetheless; none of his business if he would always wait for Harley to push him away the same way he had brushed Howard to the side, and that day was now coming to pass; none of his business at all if Harley turned towards a strong and moral man for the things he couldn’t get from Tony.

No matter how much Tony gave to Harley, it would never be enough. 

Tony’s knees buckled with no warning and he threw out a hand to catch himself on the wall, his fingers scrambling against the plaster. He stole a moment to breathe, to attempt to steady his heartbeat, before straightening. Upright, he could look at things with perspective.

The perspective told him to accept the fact that he would never be the positive influence that Harley needed. 

Another breath.

Okay. Okay.

He walked away.

Steve and Harley, meanwhile, were frozen. 

“I offended him, didn’t I?” said Steve quietly, with something sour simmering below the words.

“You couldn’t,” said Harley, the words rising to his tongue unbidden. “You couldn’t offend him.”

“I’ve hurt him too many times to count, son,” Steve said, and that bitterness had taken over entirely. Harley turned and saw the drastic change in Steve: where he had been lounging, feline and whimless, he was now sat board-straight with his feet pressed to the ground as if ready to run. “I think I hurt ‘em past the point of fixing.”

Harley knew what had happened in Siberia. He knew, and Peter did, because they were horrible little gremlins and had hacked into FRIDAY’s suit archives and watched the video of the shield cracking the bones of Tony’s chest and trapping him in a powerless, metal cage, freezing from his blood to his bone marrow as the northern Russian cold sunk into the suit as if it were a refrigerator and Tony was a hunk of bloody meat. 

Tony didn’t know that they knew. They had done a pretty bang-up job covering up their tracks by taking that opportunity to turn all of the S.I. worker profile images to the likeness of Rubeus Hagrid, Peter’s favorite Harry Potter character. 

So he really shouldn’t be shocked by Tony’s reaction to him spending so much time around Steve. He wasn’t upset about it, wasn’t hurt that Tony would assume the worst of Steve. He himself assumed the worst of Steve at first. Drunkenly. In public. And captured forever in a video on Ned’s phone. 

Knowing Steve, though, was different. Steve was by no means always right, nor a particularly good role model. But he was a good guy, kind-hearted and strong and always willing to help. He was a good distraction, and Harley always needed one of those. 

But he needed Tony more, most, always, and forever. 

Tony knew him inside and out. 

He knew that he drank his tea with lots of sugar. He knew he always played as Luigi in Mario Kart. He knew that his left hand was bigger than the right from playing guitar. He knew his home in Tennessee was so full of goddamn ghosts that he couldn’t live there any longer and thus took it upon himself to claim Harley as his own in order to assure he could grow up in a place that promoted his well-being. 

And he knew Tony right back.

Knew the difference between when he was kept awake by nightmares or by a bout of brilliant inspiration by how many cups of coffee he drank. Knew his shoe size and his shirt size and that his favorite jacket was soft, worn corduroy and had once belonged to Rhodey. 

He knew, above all, that Tony would never see himself as a good father, because Howard had ripped him into pieces that he was still working on putting together all these decades later.

He could only imagine what Tony must be thinking, with that wild imagination of his and self-hatred bubbling up to his eyelids. The man must assume Harley was turning on him, turning _towards_ Steve, or something else wildly incorrect but validated by his fear. 

But- no matter what the man had done in the past, and no matter how careless both he and Harley had been regarding Tony’s feelings of late- it wasn’t Steve’s fault that Tony was hurting. 

So Harley told him as he stood, “you have. There’s no excuses for the past, but the past is— done. You’re both making an effort to be good to each other, to be understanding. That’s all you can do. Time will do the rest.” He stopped as he reached the doorway, paintbrush and cleaning solvent clenched in his hands, and leaned his hip in the door frame. “Brothers fight,” he said simply, remembering a time that a very wise woman told him the same thing.

Steve perked up very slightly and nodded, a bob of his head. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Thank you, Harley,” he said. “If you’re goin’ to ‘em now, I’ll wait ‘til later, I guess.”

“Yeah,” said Harley. “I’ve got a dad to go hug.”

\---

It took a surprisingly long time to find Tony. He was in none of his usual places— the lab, the balcony, the gym. He wasn’t even in his bedroom, which was so rarely used that the bed was crisply made and a film of dust coated the top of the dresser. When Harley finally caved and asked FRIDAY where he could find Tony and was directed to the _roof_, he was suitably concerned. 

With an anxious beat pounding in his chest, he rode the elevator all the way up. The doors opened and the breeze immediately caught Harley off guard, ruffling his hair and raising chills on his arms. 

Tony was sat halfway between the elevator doors and the edge of the roof, which did little to steady Harley’s racing pulse. His back was to the elevator, his arms wrapped around himself and fists gripping the back of his well-worn MIT sweatshirt. The concrete of the roof was hot even through Harley’s socks as he crossed to Tony, taking breaths so deep they ached in his lungs, trying to infuse boldness into his bones.

When he reached Tony’s side, the man did not look at him. Harley’s throat stung, and he swallowed convulsively to attempt to mitigate it but it did nothing to help. 

He was not good at handling situations where people were mad at him. Not at all. 

He knew Tony would never hurt him like- _him_\- but that meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. Absolutely nothing. 

His eyes filled and he dropped a hand onto Tony’s head, looping into the curls. 

“Tony,” he whimpered, and came down to his knees hard beside him. “I’m so sorry. I should have explained to you better. It’s my fault. I owe you more. I know how rough it is between you and- and him. And I know you still get, uh, nervous, about me, and me living with you, and how to be a good role model or whatever-”

“Harley,” Tony whispered brokenly, gaze still locked on the horizon.

“Let me finish, please,” he begged, tears precarious at the edge of his eyelids. “Please, just let me. Sorry. God, Tony, I’m sorry for hurting you. When I saw your face, right before you walked away, it gutted me so bad. I didn’t- I shouldn’t have let it go that far. I’m sorry.”

“Harley,” Tony said, finally turning. His eyes were red-rimmed, mirroring Harley’s own. All at once his face folded and then repeated, like a litany, “Harley, _Harley_, no. No, _I’m_ sorry-”

“Don’t,” Harley growled.

“-that you feel like you need to apologize for me, making myself crazy,” Tony continued as if there had been no interruption. “I’m goddamn immature, Jesus. Fuck. It’s my fault for making you feel bad for hanging out with Rogers. He’s a good guy, someone to look up to,” the last words came out brittle, “definitely better than I’ll ever be, don’t you forget that.”

“Horseshit,” Harley snapped, slapping his hands down hard on his thighs. “God, we’re both such a goddamn mess. Tony, you mean the world to me. I’d never want to replace you. Just. If you need me to remind you of that sometimes, ask. I like Steve, sure. He’s my friend. But, you? You’re my _guy_, you’re the one I look up to.”

“You shouldn’t. Haven’t you heard? I ripped the team apart single-handedly and take after my father— except for his sense of discipline and responsibility, which I so obviously lack.”

“Where did you hear that? A tabloid? Why would you read that? And, shit, why would you _believe_ it? Believe us, believe _me_,” Harley said, his voice becoming quieter as he spoke. “We both did a bad job of communicating about this, I think. We’ll do better now, yeah?”

Tony shook his head sharply. “I don’t want to dump all of my trauma bullshit on you. You don’t deserve that. You’re not my therapist. I just have to work on- reminding myself.”

“Uh, Tony,” Harley said, wiping his nose on the shoulder of his shirt. “I don’t know if you forgot, but my middle name is _Trauma Bullshit_. I dump all mine on you; you can return the favor. It’s like sharing.”

“Sharing?” repeated Tony, squinting.

“Ah-hmm,” affirmed Harley with a frantic nod. 

“I’ll think about it,” Tony said.

“That’s all I could ask for,” responded Harley, the tension melting from his muscles, relaxing further onto his knees. He looked away from Tony, out towards the skyline, brash and bold and jagged as it drew its metal talons along the perfectly blue horizon. 

Tony licked the side of his thumb and slowly reached towards Harley, rubbing it against Harley’s nearer cheekbone and slipping his other hand around the back of his neck to hold him steady. Harley instinctually flinched backwards as he saw the hand approaching out of the corner of his eye. 

Tony froze, thumb stilled on his cheek, eyes wide. “Sorry. Sorry, sorry.”

Harley patted Tony’s hand to communicate that it was okay, freeing that momentary panic from his chest in a puff of breath. Then, he frowned at Tony in confusion. 

“Paint on your face, _patatino_,” Tony murmured, resuming rubbing at Harley’s face, continuing even after the paint was gone. He let his hand slip forward to cup Harley’s cheek, his fingers snaking behind his ear and his palm pressed into the hollow below his cheekbone. Harley leaned into the touch, then careened forward to press their foreheads together. 

Tony huffed out a thick laugh, his eyes fluttering shut. 

“Love you, Tony,” Harley whispered.

A reverent sort of awe pooled in the pit of Tony’s stomach, so cavernous and gaping only seconds before but now bubbling over with something so warm and light and all-encompassing that he didn’t know how he could have ever lived without it. This was his boy, his first boy, here, in his arms, assuring him in his brazen way that he was _his_. And it was everything he had never known he needed.

“Yeah?” Tony asked.

“God,” Harley said, and it was choked, as if he were astounded that Tony needed to affirm the veracity of this, of all things. He pulled away so he could meet Tony’s wavering gaze. “Of course I love you, you big dump dope.” He sniffled, tears pooling in his eyes again. “Of course I do. Don’t make me say it again, though, or I’ll snot all over you.”

Tony bit hard on his tongue to hold in a sob— one of pure joy, relief, horrible, terrible, wholehearted love that was so potent it threatened to drown him. He pulled Harley’s head to rest under his chin, button nose all squished against his collarbone, and buried himself in those blond curls. He pressed a kiss to them, and then another. “_Tu mi manchi_,” he murmured. “I love you, I love you.” And he felt it right down to his every atom.

He was sure, for once, that this was an unconditional type of thing. No man or beast or supersoldier could break this bond. 

With Harley in his arms, _God_. He knew it.

iii  
After Tony and Harley had their little _roof talk_, things got easier. 

Not good, per say, but easier.

Easy enough that, when Pepper and May realized that there were simply not enough groceries in the tower to prepare for the impromptu party they were throwing for Thor’s visit from New Asgard, Tony suggested they send Peter and Harley to go pick up what they lacked— with Steve and Bucky for adult supervision.

“What?” said Harley. 

“What?” said Bucky. 

“Cool!” crowed Peter.

Steve looked as if he were so touched by the gesture that he had lost the ability to speak, simply nodding frantically to communicate the honor he felt at having been chosen for such a task.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you all needta’ get out of the house more often. If no one forced you to, you’d sit in a dark corner all day, no sound, no company, and nothing to do.”

“That sounds like heaven,” said Harley.

“You sound like Air Supply,” said Tony. 

“You sound like a crotchety old man,” quipped Harley, puckering his lips and blowing kisses at Tony after he said it. 

Tony rolled his eyes and flipped him the bird. “Just go get— the stuff.”

“Specific,” commented Harley while pulling on his sneakers, one hand buried in the fabric of a confused Bucky’s shirt to balance himself. He frowned at the wrinkles Harley was creating and made a little sound of offense. Harley grinned remorselessly and smoothed out the creases, perhaps a little too heavy-handed to be socially acceptable. He turned to Peter and mouthed _wow_ with bulging eyes, his hand stilled on Bucky’s abdominal region. Peter snorted a laugh even as Bucky flicked Harley on the ear to deter him. 

“I’ll send you a list, sweetie,” said May, wiping her frighteningly tomato-covered hands on her very dirty apron and stepping forward to plant a kiss on the cheek of each Peter and Harley. She had been delegated to chopping duty, seeing as she absolutely could not be trusted anywhere near a stove, oven, toaster, or microwave. She was doing a great job of accidentally painting the kitchen with tomato guts and beet juice. “Be safe, be responsible, watch your backs. Yeah?”

“Yup!” Peter grinned, tucking a loose piece of May’s hair behind her ear. She leaned in and pecked him on the nose before shoving him towards the door with her elbow.

He shot a blinding smile at her over his shoulder before taking his leave, calling out a squeaky little “bye Pepper! Bye Tony! Bye May!” before turning around the corner and disappearing from view. 

Harley called out his similar goodbyes, setting off to follow Peter, shoving his hands deep into his pockets as he went. He peeked his head back around the doorway after a moment. “Remember to text me that list or I won’t know what to get and I’ll just grab so much ice cream. _All_ of the ice cream,” he quantified, then shot one of his Cheshire grins at them and raced off, the sound of his sneakers clapping on the ground echoing in his wake.

Steve, Bucky, Tony, and Pepper watched him disappear. After a beat, Steve said, “we’ll reign them in. No ice cream,” in his most headass, high and mighty voice, and followed Harley out of the door. 

Bucky raised an eyebrow in a practiced expression of skepticism and remained just long enough to say, “I forgot. He was always a liar. He coulda’ been in a picture, acting like that. Make room in the freezer for, uh, _all of the ice cream_.” And with that, he bumbled along behind the others, pulling a baseball cap he’d filched from Tony solidly over his eyes as he went.

Tony blinked. “Well. You could never say Barnes isn’t honest.”

Harley and Peter were waiting in the lobby for Bucky and Steve, discussing something unintelligible with nearly frightening levels of hutzpah, arms flailing and eyebrows jumping and miming stomping on something with exaggerated aggression. 

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” Harley was offering in a placating tone, “but I’m saying you’re wrong. There is no way that even you could jump off of flat ground and land hard enough to explode a _whole watermelon_. The force applied wouldn’t be enough to break the rind _and_ smash through all of the inner flesh.”

“Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve,” said Peter scathingly, poking a finger into Harley’s ribs and savoring the affronted little squeak he pulled from the blond.

“Don’t you _ever_ use Ginny Weasley against me,” threatened Harley, tugging Peter into a headlock. Rather than trying to jab at him, Harley delved straight into merciless tickling that left Peter wheezy and tear-stricken by the time Steve and Bucky reached their side.

“Why are you always arguing about something dumb?” asked Bucky.

“Cuz it’s _fun_,” huffed Peter, slapping the arm Harley kept around his neck, peering up at them through his curls. Harley released him and endured the tweak Peter dealt to his nose good-naturedly. 

Steve and Bucky shared a look, amused but just as lost as they always were around that pair. 

“We’ve got this whole _vibe_ going on,” said Peter once he had bounced back to attention, gesturing between him and Harley and Steve and Bucky. “This whole tall blond and short brunette thing-”

“I resent the fact that I was just roped into the short group,” said Bucky, raising a finger.

“Well, you are shorter,” said Steve.

“I can still kick your flat ass to kingdom come, babydoll,” said Bucky.

“I like being tall,” said Harley, straightening his back until his chin cleared Peter’s head entirely. “You’re a little munchkin, ain'tcha, Pete?”

“I regret bringing this up,” said Peter, flicking the underside of Harley’s chin and marching out of the lobby, leaving the other three scrambling to catch up with him.

“Are we going to the Trader Joe’s on Broadway?” called Harley, tripping over his own feet. “That’s where Pep goes. She likes their tomatoes. She says they ship ‘em in _aaaall_ the way from Jersey.”

Peter shuddered. “Ew. Jersey.”

Steve huffed a sigh, squinting as they stepped out onto the sidewalk, immediately swayed by the crowd. “Guess we’re taking the subway, then.”

“Oh, shit,” Peter said, turning fully around and leaning to make eye contact with first Bucky and then Steve. “Is that going to be okay? I’m sure we can take a cab or, like, an Uber, or something.”

“I’ll be okay,” said Bucky, looking over to Steve. “Got my best guy right here to catch me if I fall off,” he teased as he tucked himself under Steve’s shoulder.

“Uh, I did a _terrible_ job of that the first time, in case you fuh’got,” said Steve in a thin voice, pupils visibly dilating in panic.

“We don’t have to take the subway,” Peter assured them. “Hey, it’s only, like, fifteen blocks. Let’s just walk it, so we can prove to Tony that we actually do physical activity sometimes.”

“Fifteen blocks,” Harley whined, but started walking anyway, the rest of them following. “As the only non-enhanced human here, I feel very oppressed. This is going to cause me _pain_.”

Peter grabbed Harley’s hand and slung it over his shoulder. “Stop whining, Potato,” he said with a cheeky grin, his dimples on full display. “If we gotta, we can call Happy to bring us home so we won’t have to carry all the bags.”

Harley scowled, but yanked Peter tighter to his side anyway. “I make a lotta sacrifices for you fellas. I sure hope you appreciate it.”

“We _do_,” chirped Peter. 

“Eh,” said Bucky, tilting his hand side to side. Steve cuffed him around the head. 

A yell startled them out of their little world. “Oh, my god. Is that Steve Rogers? Are you _Steve Rogers_?”

“Never heard of him before in my life,” said Steve. 

“Uh,” said the woman who had yelled, but the crowd had carried her away before she could say anything else. 

Harley snorted a laugh, turning over his shoulder to make eye contact with Steve. “You get that a lot, Cap?”

“Is that Steve Rogers?” called another voice.

Steve gave him a pointed look before turning towards the disembodied voice. “Never heard of him before in my life.”

Bucky pulled his- Tony’s- cap off his head and plopped it down onto Steve’s, smushing his overgrown fringe onto his forehead. He then rubbed the cap around, mussing Steve’s hair until it was wild with static and poking out in all directions under the rim and through the strap. 

“Cute,” Bucky told him, smirking at his dishevelment. 

“Bastard,” Steve said affectionately. He didn’t bother fixing his hair, looking rather goofily endeared by it.

Peter turned to Harley with a grin. “Aww,” he said. 

“Gross,” Harley agreed. 

Harley was whining about his knees hurting by the time they got to the store, and Peter was about to offer him a piggy-back ride just to shut him up when he got sidetracked by-

“_Oh my god lookatthatdog_,” Peter said shrilly, dropping to all fours on the sidewalk (_gross, sidewalk germs_, said Harley) and reaching a hand out to pet it. It was a golden retriever, huge and fluffy and tongue lolling out of his mouth, tied to a parking meter by his leash. Peter leaned over and read the dog tag, then dropped it and threw his hands in the air with a squeal. “_His name is Pierre_,” he gushed, dropping his hands and rubbing the dog’s neck.

Harley squatted next to Peter, before immediately getting bowled over by Pierre’s enthusiastic kisses. “Okay okay okay okay okay,” said Harley, dog spit smudging his glasses and the dog’s paws digging into his stomach. “Yes, hi, I am a human. Yes, it is nice to meet you. Oh, hi. Yes. Hello. Hi,” Harley said, struggling to ease out from under the dog before it accidentally disemboweled him. “Your nails are sharp, bud. Do you have an owner? Did they not take you to the dog salon this week?” Harley turned to Peter. “I don’t know how dogs work.” Then, back to Pierre, “did they leave you tied up here all on your lonesome?”

Bucky and Steve squatted down next to the boys. The dog took one look at Steve and then wholeheartedly ignored him in favor of Bucky, letting loose a loud bark and then knocking him over the same way he had done Harley. 

“That hurt my feelings,” said Steve mildly, watching as Bucky sputtered under the dog. 

“Why do I only attract clingy blonds?” Bucky groused, shooting a glare at each Steve and Harley before turning back to Pierre. He grabbed the dog around the middle and lifted him like a squirmy loaf of bread before depositing him back on the sidewalk. “Stay,” Bucky told him.

Pierre grinned up at him, tail wagging.

“Okay,” said Bucky to the dog. He turned. “Okay,” he said to Steve, Harley, and Peter. “Let’s please leave before Peter sneaks the damn thing under his shirt and steals it.”

Peter was indeed looking at the dog with a hungry sort of desperation in his eyes. Harley scoffed and grabbed Peter by the shirtsleeve, pulling him away.

“Bye, Pierre!” Peter called over his shoulder, struggling to wave to the dog even as they passed through the enormous entrance doors to the supermarket. A shock of air conditioning huffed down onto them and it ruffled their hair as they walked on. “Wait! Maybe he doesn’t know English! _Au revoir, mon ami_!” 

Steve turned to Bucky and smirked, slinging an arm over his shoulder. “Dernier would have pissed himself over that dog. Woulda’ killed him knowing someone named their dog a French human name.”

“Would’ve sat there and gabbed at it in French all the damn day long, perfectly satisfied,” Bucky agreed. 

Peter grabbed a cart and Bucky grabbed a second, knowing that it would take a minimum of two carts to carry a meal suited for the entirety of the extended Avengers. 

Harley, without a second thought, clambered into the basket of Peter’s cart like a child, his long limbs all bunched up and his eyes gleaming with excitement. 

Peter met his glance and grinned back, pushing the cart without questioning it.

The first thing that struck them about the supermarket was most definitely its size. It was of a magnitude so breathtakingly unnecessary that all four of them found themselves to be immediately tongue-tied. The floors were shiny linoleum and the ceilings were incomprehensibly tall. In the entryway stood so many displays of unfamiliar fruits and vegetables that they froze in shock in tandem. 

“This is nothing like a bodega,” Peter said weakly at the same time that Bucky said, “we sure ain’t eating like it’s the thirties anymore, Stevie.”

Harley clambered out of the cart gracelessly, tumbling as his shoelaces caught on the mangled wire of the basket. Steve caught him by the elbows, but they were both still slack-jawed and hyper focused. 

“The _fuck_ is a kumquat?” demanded Harley, marching over to the stand and grabbing one of the orange orbs. He held it close to his face and turned it between his fingers, examining the taut skin. He lifted it to his nose and gave it a cautious sniff.

“What’s it smell like?” asked Bucky.

“Nothing,” said Harley scathingly, dropping it back onto the stand.

Without discussing it, they all broke into their own worlds, ambling between the stands and commenting to themselves the strangeness of the different produce. 

Steve spent a long time staring open-mouthed at the oranges- enormous and firm and sickly sweet, even through the rind- tossing one at Bucky and grinning when Bucky took a double-take at it as well. 

Peter felt morally obligated to covertly sniff each different apple, thoroughly appreciating the slight differences he could pick up between them.

Though he had always declared his enhanced senses to be a hindrance for Peter Parker and a help for Spider-Man, _this_ was something they did that- miraculously- benefitted _Peter_. It was _way_ better than smelling gasoline so acutely that he puked in the street, or being awakened in the night by the taste of Harley’s tears sitting salty in the back of his tongue. Sure, this was far less helpful than the latter, but maybe that was why it was so wonderful. It was something painless but also completely unbound by repercussions. It was— freeing. It was taking something he associated with stress and stripping it of its inscrutable aura. Now, it was Peter’s. It belonged to _him_.

And it was beautiful.

Eventually they wound their way to each other, startled back into following their initial purpose by the buzzing of Peter’s phone with a text from Pepper: the list of supplies for them to pick up.

“What’s the difference between regular flour and semolina?” asked Peter as the pushed the cart over to Steve and Bucky, who were examining a Joie Avocado Pod far too closely.

“Uh,” said Steve.

“Don’t ask him,” said Bucky, returning the plastic avocado shell to the shelf. “He can only cook Shepherd’s Pie. Literally nothing else. Semolina is durum wheat, usually used in Italian cuisine. Bread, pasta, some cakes.”

Steve looked at him inquisitively. “Where the hell didja learn that, Buck?”

Bucky shrugged. “Moonlighted as a pasta chef in Siena while on a mission in the seventies. Hey, where’s Harley?”

Peter turned and squinted. “Probably groping the peaches or something.”

They found Harley absentmindedly squeezing cucumbers, his eyes shut and the worry-lines smoothed from his face, gently swaying and mouthing along to _Bleed To Love Her_ as it played from the store speakers. Peter couldn’t help but pull out his phone and tape him for a moment so that he could smile about it for the rest of his life. 

They went back to shopping after that, Harley standing precariously on the bottom rack of the cart, smushed between the handle and Peter’s stomach, as Peter coasted them along. Bucky and Steve walked beside them, Steve reading off the list and Bucky bagging vegetables and complaining about how this was supposed to be a _team effort_ and _the kids are being more of a nuisance than a help_. 

“Our job description is _professional nuisances_,” said Harley.

“Tony will agree to that,” said Peter earnestly.

“_I_ will agree to that,” said Harley. “I may be a pain in the ass, okay, but I am self-aware.”

“Brussels sprouts are next,” interjected Steve.

“_Brussels sprouts_,” repeated Harley in a tone one might use to say _genital herpes_ or _nuclear holocaust_.

Steve shrugged. “It’s on the list.”

“Can we go get the cereal?” asked Peter. 

“Yes,” said Bucky quickly. “Go get cereal and Steve and I will finish here. So you can be far away from us.”

“Okay!” Peter chirped, pushing the cart off towards the dry food aisles. After they cleared the produce stands, he looked both ways in a conspiratory manner that gave Harley a lot of anxiety.

He turned them into an aisle and, upon noticing it was empty, gave the cart a solid push. He hopped up onto the rack with his feet on either side of Harley’s, letting them coast past bottles of vitamins and boxes of toothpaste. They kept it up, picking up speed and laughing out loud with swooping stomachs, filled to the brim with a reckless sort of abandon that they had been tampering down for far too long. 

Six aisles later, they knocked over some boxes of macaroni and cheese and spent the next five minutes reorganizing them into their original tower formation. They apologized profusely to the store attendant and decided to walk away rather than skating— at least until they reached the next aisle and were out of her sightline.

By the time they reached the cereal, they were breathless with laughter and their cart was still empty. They had almost stopped to grab Pop Tarts, and then again at the pita chips, but there was something about shopping off-list that would always rub two under-privileged kids the wrong way. 

“Okay,” said Peter, still giggling. “Okay. Which cereal should we get?”

“Mm. Cheerios,” said Harley, clapping a hand down on the handrail of the cart decisively. 

Peter nodded. “A respectable choice. Should we get two boxes, since so many people will be home?”

Harley hesitated, a wince wrinkling his nose and making his glasses slip down his face. “How many did Pepper write on the list?” 

“Uh,” Peter checked. “It just says _cereal_. No quantifier.”

“Yikes,” said Harley. He scratched his neck. “We were the worst two people to be sent food shopping for a billionaire, because no matter how rich he is, I will feel so bad. For buying anything.”

“And Steve and Bucky are no help on that front, either— did you hear Steve yelp when he saw that apples are two bucks a pound?”

Harley snorted. “Uh, yeah, of course I did. I got it on video. And Bucky weighing a watermelon in each hand to see which was heavier? That was peak supermarket humor.”

Peter sighed, smiling a small smile. “They’re— great. I’m really glad everything worked itself out between them and Tony.”

Harley didn’t stop the snort that sentiment wrought out of him in time. 

Peter whipped around to look at him warily. “What? Did something else happen?”

Harley let out a sigh. “It’s my fault, really. I hurt Tony’s feelings by hanging out with Steve so much because I never told him about it ahead of time and he got worried. He must have felt like I was sneaking around behind his back but, frankly, I just didn’t think to tell him. I mean, I’m pretty much only used to hanging out with you-” Harley jabbed him in the ribs, “and I obviously don’t need to warn him about _that_ beforehand. So it didn’t occur to me to tell him about Steve. And- you know how he worries. He’s like, a chronic worrier. It’s a deadly disease. He’s gonna exacerbate his heart issues. As much as he doesn’t want to say it, I think he’s afraid Steve is gonna hurt me. Which, he won’t. Duh. But still.”

Peter _hmph_ed thoughtfully. “Did he and Steve talk about it?”

“Of course not. What do you think they are, _proactive and mentally healthy_? Psh.”

“Psh,” Peter agreed. “We oughta make ‘em talk.”

“If Thor brings that mythical space vodka for Steve…” Harley trailed off. “That might be an opportunity.”

“Don’t let Tony drink anything other than wine,” Peter threatened. “We all need to be on the alert. He’s been doing really well but I want to make sure the whole party atmosphere doesn’t knock him over.”

“Knock who over?” came Steve’s voice, enthusiastic as he pushed the cart overflowing with green things and red things and purple things towards them, Bucky balancing on the opposite end of it. He hopped off when the cart rolled to a stop. 

“No one,” said Harley, while Peter said, “Tony. We want to make sure he doesn’t drink at the party.”

Harley shot Peter a glare. “If you wake up floating on your mattress in the Hudson, you’ll know who did it.”

Steve was frowning at them. “Did Tony quit drinking? When?”

Peter blinked. “He’s been mostly dry since, like, two Octobers ago. Why, have you seen him drinking recently?”

A muscle in Steve’s jaw clenched. “Well, we’ll make sure he stays on the horse at the party.”

There was something about that reaction that did not sit right with Peter or Harley. “I feel like you’re not telling us something,” said Harley, squinting. 

“It’s not my business,” said Steve with a finality to his tone. 

“Yeah, but it is _our_ business,” said Harley, frustration mounting. 

With a grimace, Steve waved a hand noncommittally. “I don’t know what I saw. He was in the lab drinking something out of a glass and- I mean, it could’ve been anything. I just assumed.” His tone grew more introspective suddenly. “I have to stop doing that. Assuming I know everything about him. Because I’m always proven wrong.”

Harley and Peter shared a glance, feeling a small bit of relief. The two of them knew that Tony only kept soda and pre-made coffee in the lab; they had made sure of it. Tony was trustworthy. He _was_. They could trust that he would at least tell him if he had drank.

Probably.

“Yeah. He is- multitudes. He’s got a lot more to him than most people would guess,” Harley said fervently. He then clapped his hands sharply, effectively cutting through the thick tension that had clouded around them. “Let’s finish off that list before things get any more awkward, shall we?”

\---

Shopping finished quickly, mostly because they were so off-put by the prices of everything that they felt a bone-deep need to get out of there as soon as humanly possible. 

Even as it was, the final price of the trip had them all slack-jawed. 

“I’ve never seen a number that big on a cash register,” said Harley weakly. His weekly farmer’s market trips back home were less than a tenth of the cost— though he usually got some produce free, on account of all the vendors knowing his momma and their situation. And Harley was charming. He could usually get an extra jar of jam with just his smile and a few flirty compliments for the (cute and easy to fluster) boy working the counter. 

Bucky was wincing. “This feels wrong. Even though we didn’t buy anything other than what Pepper said.”

The cashier was tapping her fingernails against the countertop, waiting for Peter to hand over Tony’s credit card.

Once he finally had and they were getting ready to leave, the woman held out a hand to stop them. “I just hate to ask, but are you Steve Rogers?” 

Steve looked at her evenly, then removed his cap in one swift motion. He combed his hair back with his fingertips and, just as he opened his mouth to answer, she interrupted. 

“Oh- my bad. You just looked like him, but the nose and hair are all wrong. You could be his cousin or something, though. Same face shape.”

There was a tense moment where they all visibly strained to hold in the sputtering of laughter that threatened to burst free from their lips. 

“Well, have a good day!” the woman said, a quirked expression of confusion coloring her face.

They pushed out of the store as quickly as they could to limit the probability of one of them laughing in front of her.

“That was beautiful,” wheezed Harley once they were out of her earshot. “I want to live in that moment for the rest of my life.”

“What is so wrong about my _nose_?” demanded Steve. “I look the same as I did yesterday, and two years ago, and when I got the goddamn serum in the first place.”

“The public don’t realize what a big, ugly nose you got since they’ve gotcha so airbrushed on your posters,” Bucky snorted, slugging him in the shoulder.

“The public don’t realize what a big, ugly jerk you are since they’ve gotcha all pretty and giggling in the museum reel,” Steve shot back.

“Punk,” said Bucky. “You’re a punk. I’m really gonna kick your ass one of these days.”

“Fat chance,” said Steve.

Harley’s phone started to ring in his pocket, the sound of the _you are my dad, boogie woogie woogie_ vine playing out loud and startling Steve and Bucky out of their argument.

Harley, with a _you’ve got a problem with that?_ sort of expression on his face, slowly removed his phone from his pocket and answered the call. “Hey, Ugly.”

“_Hey, Chicken Little_,” said Tony. “_Tell Peter to turn on his ringer._”

“Sorry!” called Peter, currently in the process of grabbing as many shopping bags as he could hold. “My bad. We’re all- uh. Good here!”

“_Yeah, okay_,” said Tony drily. “_I just wanted to make sure you kids are safe, seeing as it’s been three hours and none of us have heard from you since you left_.”

“Holy _guacamole_,” said Harley, checking his watch. Sure enough, it was almost five in the afternoon. “It’s been three hours? Jesus. Sorry, Tony. We lost track of time.”

“_You guys are good, though? No car accidents or stroller kidnappings?_” The same tension that first underlied Tony’s voice when he was concerned about Harley’s friendship with Steve was there now as well, quiet but much more obvious since Harley had learned what to look for. 

Something in his heart softened, fast and relentless, and he almost swayed on his feet from the force of it. “Hey, we’re fine,” Harley said gently. “I mean, would’ve been more fun with you here, but, y’know. You’re busy; can’t have it all. Next time we’ll bring you, though, because there was some real funky lookin’ fruit that I just know you’d get a kick out of. There was a mango that looked _just_ like Rhodey.”

A laugh came over the line, tinny from the sudden increase in volume. “_Okay, kiddo. Next time I’ll come and we’ll buy a weird fruit for all of us. Maybe there’s some rhubarb that looks like Pepper, or a May-shaped dragon fruit or something._”

“I’m scared of the dragon fruit!” called Peter, struggling to add another bag to his arms. A jar of peanut butter fell loose from it and rolled to Harley’s feet. He picked it up and read the jar.

“Aw, man, who bought _extra chunky_ peanut butter?” he whined. 

“_That’s my cue to hang up_,” said Tony. “_You guys walking home?_”

Harley looked around at all of them, the three enhanced weirdos already laden with bags from their shoulders all the way to their wrists and looking as if they were ready to handle more. Somehow, there were no bags left for Harley to carry. “Uh, I think so,” he told Tony. 

“_Mmkay. Just call back if you need anything_.”

“Will do! See ya in a minute,” Harley said, then hung up. He turned back to the others. “Okay, please give me a bag so I don’t look like an idiot walking all the way back with nothing while you guys put on your Ringling Brothers act.”

Peter handed him a fabric bag that had no less than eight pints of ice cream strewn in it. Harley looked at them and grinned. “Oh, yes. Worth it. That was all worth it for this.”

“_Hey, is that Steve Rogers_?” 

Steve winced. “Worth it.”

iv  
The dreaded time had come. 

Harley’s spaciness had, indeed, created a problem for him.

A really big, huge problem.

“I AM STUPID / BUT FINE” he tapped in sloppy morse code against the arm of the metal chair he was tied to, Tony listening intently through the connection of his panic watch.

Tony painstakingly tapped back, “TRACKED U. IN 15” and Harley blew out a sigh of relief before cutting off the connection.

The kidnappers, although, _hah,_ tactically creative, were also idiots. 

They were idiot sorcerers who didn’t realize any kid that hung around Tony Stark was going to be papered from his eyelids to his buttcrack with emergency protocol training and technology so they may escape this exact situation without fearing for their lives.

They were idiot sorcerers who possessed Steve Rogers with some sort of mind control spell and forced him to kidnap Harley as Stark-bait while they were eating ice cream in Central Park.

If Harley had been tuned-in rather than staring unseeingly at his rapidly melting dole-whip as it ran over the edges of his styrofoam cup and stickied his fingers, maybe he would have seen the cloud of purple, shimmery shit before Steve inhaled a super-sized lungful of it. 

Then, he wouldn’t have let Steve pull him into the car with a glazed look in his eyes and drive in entirely the opposite direction of the tower for fifteen minutes before knocking Harley out with a swift punch to the temple and, somehow, bringing them into this damp, smelly, warehouse-basement looking thing.

There was nothing in the room that could give Harley a clue as to where they were. Him and Steve- strapped to a chair beside him and jacked up on some crazy sedative that had him out since before Harley had come-to ten minutes ago- were completely alone in the dead center of the room, which was enormous and cavernous with stone walls and an incessant dripping noise coming from one of the corners behind them. From the ceiling before them hung a single security camera, focused on them even in the darkness that made Harley’s vision squirm unsurely, a single red light blinking as if taunting them. The bitter bite of chemicals stung Harley’s sinuses, and he wondered how powerful Steve’s sedative ought to be in order to keep him under even with the constant sensory stimulation the room was offering. As it was, the dull ache in his head from the whack Steve had administered was exacerbating the vexatiousness of the _drip, drip_. 

A small part of Harley wanted to wake the guy up somehow, but he knew that any effort to do so would probably just draw their captors back to them. It was gracious that they were left alone, really, because that meant they probably weren’t going to be tortured— just used as bargaining chips.

It also gave Harley a chance to examine the gaping wound a sloppily-dodged gunshot had carved into his leg when the assholes had come to- examine? intimidate? creepily stare at and possibly cast super secret spells upon?- them, minutes after Harley had woken up and had- impulsively, stupidly, in a haze of sheer panic- attempted to slip out from under the vibranium chains that bound his chest to the back of the chair. 

He decided to consider the wound as systematically as possible in order to preserve the strange sense of calmness he was harboring at that moment (Tony and co. were coming to save them, would be there soon, and their captivity had no purpose other than to goad Tony to give something to the magic dudes. Steve was at his side, if need be, and neither of them were particularly _dying_ yet. Harley was just possibly concussed and bleeding. A lot. He had no reason to be scared and, really, he wasn’t. Which was ironic, seeing as just being alive gave him anxiety most days, but now he was strapped to a chair using unbreakable metal after having been kidnapped by one of his best friends and, for all intents and purposes, was at the mercy of a bunch of dumb people with magic fingers, and he was fine. If anything, _this_ should be a cause for him to worry.). 

It had been one shot fired only, and the man who did it looked as if he were bored beyond belief— as if shooting at Harley was just another tedious bit of business on his to-do list for the day. He had left immediately after Harley had cried out in pain, the heavy door slamming behind him and causing Harley’s cracked voice to echo between the rough walls. There was no bullet in the wound; it was only a graze, as long as his calf was wide, right across the meaty part of his— what the fuck was it called? He remembered learning it in Anatomy class. The- fucking. Gastrocnemius. It was his gastrocnemius that was bleeding like a severed chicken neck.

The blood was cold as it dripped down his calf, saturated his sock, and pooled in the back of his shoe. _Good thing they’re black_, he thought somewhat deliriously. _This way they won’t stain_.

He hated blood. It made his stomach churn, even though it was his own.

It hung in the still air, salt and rust like he had a scratch-and-sniff sticker that smelled of pennies. 

When he blinked, he was sure he was seeing maroon instead of black. 

And, yet, his heart pounded evenly- if a little fast- in his chest, with purposeful marks. Loud, but perhaps that was because the only sound with which it was competing was the dripping of water and the sniffle of Steve’s breath. 

He wondered how long it had been since he and Tony stopped talking. It must have been five minutes at least, which left him ten more to sit through.

He was bored. 

He would give anything for a sweet potato fry, or a few minutes to talk to Peter without alerting the captors to the existence of his watch and the fact that a portion of the Avengers were currently on their way to deliver an ass-whooping of hopefully epic proportions on Harley and Steve’s behalf. They deserved as much, really, for both having to get knocked out. And Steve having to be possessed. And Harley having to get- y’know, shot. 

He huffed out a sigh and rolled his eyes. This was tedious, the waiting. He tapped his fingers against the back of his chair once more, and willed time to pass more quickly.

\---

“I am _coming_ and that is _final_.” 

Peter’s eyes were blazing but his voice was calm, waverless. 

Tony glared at him with equal intensity. “Gosh, you are just. So adorable. Cutest ever. It is so goddamn _precious_ that you think you can say that to me and I’ll just agree with you.”

A deep breath whistled through Peter’s nose. “Tony. I’m not going to mess this up. I’m not as clumsy as you think I am, or whatever it is you’re worried about. We’ll get him back. I swear I’m a valuable asset to the team! Haven’t I proved that to you by now?”

Tony blinked. “Oh, you don’t get this at all, do you?”

“What is there to _get_?” 

A muscle in Tony’s jaw jumped worryingly. His eyes were narrowed as he looked at Peter, stalking nearer to him like a predator to prey. Peter did not back down, even as Tony was close enough to feel the frantic puff of his breath. “What is there to _get_?” he repeated, hushed and deadly. “Maybe the life of my kid is in danger right now, and maybe I don’t want to have to worry about my other kid getting hurt right along with him, hmm? Maybe I don’t want both of my kids in the grasp of a bunch of- evil fucking _wizards_, okay? That make sense, Spider-Man?”

“What about _me_?” Peter whispered sharply, and, finally, his voice cracked. His face folded, angry tears glossing his eyes over. “That’s my _brother_ in there. I can’t sit here while he’s in danger and just _wait_, or listen to your comms or whatever. I can’t not be there, worrying about him and- and _you_, Tony, you too. I can’t sit here and wonder if-” he raked his hands through his hair. “Wonder if I’ll lose both of you in one shot. I can’t sit here useless, I _can’t_ do that. So either I come with you on the quinjet and we’re all peaceful and a little pissed off about it, or you go without me and I sneak out after you and make my own way there. Your choice.”

Tony stared at him. A long second elapsed as Bucky, Rhodes, and Natasha continued suiting up around them. “Go get your suit,” Tony said, the words clipped, before turning on his heel and summoning the suit to come close around him.

An anxious tension melted from the pit of Peter’s stomach, and he dropped his head into his hands. “Tony,” he called, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. Tony turned over his shoulder as the metal plates locked into place, something in his expression closed off. “Thank you,” Peter told him, and it was fervent.

Tony nodded tersely before turning back around. “Get on the jet. All of you. This isn’t the fucking. Snail racing championships. Lives are at stake.”

Peter grabbed his suit, choosing to change on the jet rather than hold up the extraction any longer. 

“So, uh. What do we know about the kidnapping?” Rhodey asked as they all settled into seats, having been the last to answer Tony’s summons. 

“They’re wizards, and they have Steve and Harley,” said Tony as he attempted to start up the quinjet with wildly shaking hands. 

Natasha knocked him out of the way and slipped her hands under his arms, lifting him out of the seat and taking his place. Her fingers flew across the controls, the engine whining and the jet quickly finding air. 

Tony shot her a grateful look and collapsed into an empty seat. 

“That’s all we know?” asked Rhodey, frowning as he tapped on a plate that covered his forearm.

“I talked to him for about three minutes using morse code to communicate, sourpuss, let me see you get any more than that,” Tony scowled. “All we know is that they’re alive and we have their coordinates plugged into the jet.”

Bucky sighed. “I wonder how they got the one-up on Steve. I mean, he’s an idiot, but he’s got brute strength one-upped on just about anyone.”

“Maybe they knocked him out,” Peter offered, beginning to change into his suit now that they were en route, nearing Harley with every second that elapsed. He smacked the spider at the center of his chest, the suit hugging his body. “I wish I could talk to him for a minute, let him know we’re on his way,” he muttered.

“Steve?” Rhodey asked, surprised. “I thought you were mad at him because he didn’t let you kidnap that dog from Walgreens.”

“No- not,” Peter sputtered. “Harley. I wish I could talk to Harley.” He shoved his mask over his face to mitigate his embarrassment. “And it was Trader Joe’s.”

The HUD popped up before Peter’s eyes, Karen trilling in his ears, “_Hello, Peter. The time is four thirty-six in the afternoon. You seem to be traveling at a speed beyond what you are capable of with your webs. Are you on a mission?_”

“Hey, Karen,” Peter mumbled, burying his head between his knees. _Harley, Harley, Harley_. “Yeah, I’m on a mission. Harley is missing. So’s Steve. Some wizards got ‘em.”

“_Oh, no_,” Karen said, sympathetic. “_Don’t worry, Peter. I’m sure you will save them soon. Would you like me to connect with Harley’s watch through your communication device so that you may speak to him?_”

Peter’s heart clenched a moment. Did he want to? Uh, yeah, duh. But Tony still didn’t know about that whole hacking thing, and he didn’t want to expose Harley while he wasn’t even there. So, “uh, not yet, Karen. Maybe later, okay?”

“_Sure thing, Peter. I can monitor his vitals for you in the meantime, if that is preferable_?”

“Karen, you’re amazing as hell. I love you. Please do that.”

Peter ignored the inquisitive glance he was getting from Bucky and the way Rhodey was watching him as if Peter was plotting world domination before his very eyes. Harley’s vitals popped up on the corner on his screen in pale blue, and he zeroed in on the topography of his pulse for a moment. 

Peter swore under his breath. 

“_Harley seems to be displaying rapidly increased heart and respiratory rates, as well as a lowered body temperature. These may be signs that he is entering a state of shock, caused by trauma or injury. Based on my limited assessment of his symptoms, it seems as if he has sustained an abrasion and the blood loss is affecting his health._”

Peter swore again, leaping to his feet. “Karen says Harley is injured and possibly bleeding out right now this very second and that is why I cannot sit down or breathe,” he said very quickly, growing lightheaded in one fell swoop as images of severed limbs and blood-coated lips and Harley’s white, clammy skin painted themselves in stark relief.

Tony turned quickly. “How did Karen connect to his watch? That’s supposed to be a panic button and low-quality communicator with FRIDAY only.”

“We connected it to my comms-”

“He _hacked your comms_?”

“_I honestly thought you’d figured that out by now!_” 

“You’re totally right, I did. I was just playing along.”

“This is so not what’s important!” Peter burst, throwing his arms in the air and beginning to pace. 

“Three minutes,” said Natasha brusquely from the captain seat. Though he couldn’t see her face, the sharp tenseness in her shoulders made it all too clear that she was just as worried as everyone else was.

Peter huffed out a long sigh, yanking at the edge of his mask but not pulling it off so that Karen could keep updating him as to Harley’s condition. “Has he. Uh. Changed at all, K?”

“_Not drastically. His pulse seems to be plateauing, but his temperature is continuing to slowly drop. It seems he is in no way stopping the bleeding of his wound._”

Peter crossed his arms tight around himself. 

“I can knock you out ‘til we get there,” Bucky offered, raising an eyebrow. 

“How are you so calm?” Peter demanded, his voice cracking. 

“Well,” Bucky said, then sighed. “Well. I’m not calm. Not at all. I’m just about ready to bitch outta here and run the rest of the way. But, with Steve, you kinda get used to it. The fear, the waiting. The two of ‘em’ve got each other, so you gotta think they’ll work it out.”

Peter huffed out a breath and tried, for a moment, to be as steady as Bucky. Another breath whistled its way through his nose and he gave up. He plopped himself into the seat beside Bucky, let the older man wrap an arm tight around his shoulders, and worried with his whole chest.

\---

It had been four hundred and twenty-seven seconds since Harley had started counting seconds.

There was nothing better for him to do. 

The skin of his hands was clammy. _Four hundred and twenty-nine_. His face felt cold and weightless in that way it often did when he was perilously close to fainting. _Four hundred and thirty_. The ground beneath his feet was a pool of red, tendrils of it crawling towards Steve’s chair like a spindly-fingered wraith. _Four hundred and thirty-two_. Goosebumps coated his flesh like a hearty splash of freckles. His limbs were trembling, the muscles in his leg spasming. _Four hundred and thirty-five_. 

He blacked out.

\---

“_Peter_,” Karen said. Regretful. Anxious. “_Harley has fallen unconscious_.”

Peter whimpered and fell further against his own lap. 

“What?” demanded Tony, springing to his feet. “What, what?”

“He’s unconscious,” Peter whispered, his hands pulling hard on the hair at the nape of his neck. 

“Quit,” Bucky said and knocked his hands away. “This is better. They won’t bother him if he’s out.”

Peter bit down on a sob.

\--- 

Harley phased back in. 

The puddle at his feet was only a bit larger, but had reached the base of Steve’s shoes. 

_One_, Harley thought. _Two. Three_.

\---

“_Repeat to me what you’re doing_.”

“Following from the ceiling. Avoiding the sight-line of all heat signatures and webbing up anyone I come across. Not coming to the room where Harley and Steve are until you tell me it’s safe. Hey, what if I find it first?”

Tony huffed. “_Then you call us and we go in before you_.”

Peter scowled. “But what if it’s time sensitive? What if they’re gonna, like, die if I don’t go in right then that very second?”

“_Tony_,” came Rhodey’s voice across the comms. “_This is what it feels like doing missions with you. Payback is so, so sweet_.”

“_Shut up shut up shut up_,” hissed Natasha, and then there was a soft thud. 

Peter examined the heat signatures on his HUD and saw that Natasha had just felled two wizards and was now slinking along towards what they had deduced was the intelligence center of the building. 

Someone was coming towards him- Peter could hear their breaths and their heartbeat as well as he could see it on the display- and he slunk into a corner so he had the cover of shadow. 

The woman was dressed like a normal person, which caught Peter off guard. He had assumed that wizards would dress like frickin’ wizards— robes and pointy hat and all. If _he_ was a wizard, he would have capitalized on the brand. 

“Press f for the wasted potential,” he murmured before webbing the woman to the wall in one swift shot. 

“_I hate you_,” said Bucky over the comms.

The woman followed the angle of where the webs had come from. Her eyes started to glow a fluorescent purple.

“Uh, no thanks,” said Peter, and he shot another web to cover her mouth. “Wait, what if he knows nonverbal spells? Crud,” he muttered, crawling close enough to gently smack her head against the wall. 

“_Peter, this is not Harry Potter. There are no nonverbal spells_,” grunted Tony, followed by a reverberating bang.

“_Be quieter, Toshka_,” Natasha hissed. “_You keep bumbling around and you’ll alert Voldemort of our presence_.”

“He’s doing his best,” said Peter, following the next nearest heat signature now that Hermione was out for the count.

“_He’s too nice to you_,” said Rhodey. 

“Just nice enough,” whispered Peter, webbing the next wizard to the wall by the head. “Oops. Yoink. I hope I didn’t smush his skull.”

“_You’re allowed to smush skulls_,” said Bucky. 

“Nuh uh! Why would I do that when I can just tie ‘em up good?”

Peter could hear the wizard’s heart beating so he continued on. 

“_Found Harley and Steve_,” said Bucky tersely. “_Medic. Medic _now.”

Peter’s heart dropped. “Coming. I’m coming.”

No one tried to stop him.

It took him thirty seconds to rip through three floors of the building, chasing Bucky’s fiery heat signature to find the two beside him: one especially warm, and one especially cold.

The first thing that struck him as he approached the door- open like a gaping maw and he was so afraid to be swallowed- was the sharp scent of blood, on the back of his tongue and painting his sinuses with sickly sweetness, heady and relentless. 

It nearly knocked his feet out from under him. 

He clawed into the room as if it was the only place he ever needed to be. 

It was the last place he wanted to be.

But he saw Harley and he heard his heart fluttering and he knew he was needed. So he went.

He crossed the room in three long steps and collapsed in front of Harley, not looking at Bucky and Steve or taking a moment to feel disgust as his knees splashed in the pool of Harley’s blood. _Harley’s blood_.

“Hey,” he whispered, reaching out a hand to grab Harley’s cheek. His lips were slack whitish and eyelashes ruffling against Peter’s fingers. “Look at me, Harls, please,” he breathed. 

One of Harley’s eyes winked open, the whites pinkish and the blues almost cobalt in the low light of the room. “Hey, Petey,” he croaked, a little smile quirking up his lips.

“We’re gonna get you out, okay? We’re gonna get you out now,” Peter said quickly, heart pounding against his ribs. 

Bucky had managed to pick Steve’s bonds open, and Steve was now blinking blearily against the wall, looking at all of them as if very confused as to how they had gotten there. 

Before moving around to pick Harley’s lock, Bucky dropped the med kit into Peter’s hands. Peter ripped the zipper open and grabbed as many bandages and sterile wipes as he could hold. 

“Hey, I’m gonna talk to you while I do this, okay? Can you, like, kinda let me know if you hear me?” Peter babbled, blatantly more on-edge than Harley was.

“Ah-hmm,” affirmed Harley, squinting down at Peter. “Hey, Pete.”

“Hey, buddy,” Peter whispered. “This might hurt, okay? It’s gonna squeeze tight. It’ll be better after, less bleeding.”

“Mmmkay,” said Harley. “Lots of blood is gone. Like, _poof._”

Peter stretched the elastic he was using as a tourniquet before looping it around Harley’s leg and knotting it tightly. “Like _poof_, bud. That’s okay, though, cuz we’re fixin’ it. This okay?”

“Didn’t feel it,” Harley mumbled frowning. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”

Peter bit hard on his lip. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”

“Believe you.”

Peter blew a hard breath out of his nose. “This is gonna sting, too, buddy. Okay? It’ll be a second. Can you blow out of your nose really hard while I count out loud?”

“Uh-huh,” Harley said, and immediately started to blow as hard as he could. Peter ripped open a package of sterile wipes and swiped at the back of Harley’s calf, which was striped with a deep gouge that stretched its entire width.

The puff of Harley’s breath turned into something like a mewl as the disinfectant stung in the rawness of the wound. 

“One, two, three, four- okay, I’m so sorry, Harley, I’m so sorry- you’re okay, it’s done. It’s done. It’s done,” Peter sung desperately, tossing the sopping wipes onto the ground. Now that the wound was clean, Peter could see that blood was still weeping from it, hot and fresh. “Hey. Shit. Was this a gunshot? Did you get _shot_?”

“Yeah,” Harley gasped between sharp breaths. A tear dripped over his cheekbone and it made Peter’s stomach twist. “Yeah, but, like, they did a bad job.”

“A _bad job_?” Peter wheezed. “They _got you_, how was that a bad job?”

“The bullet isn’t in me!” Harley exclaimed. 

Peter hissed frustratedly. “Harley, we have to stitch this. It’s way too big.”

Bucky finally undid the chain, and Harley’s wrists fell limply to his sides. “Should I?” asked Bucky. “Or do you want to?”

“I’ve never stitched before!” Peter squeaked, but his hands- on a completely different page than his brain- dug through the medicine bag and unearthed the needle and thread. 

“Do it,” said Bucky. “Everyone is celibate at some point. Do it.”

“Uh,” said Peter.

“Hey,” said Harley. “I’ss my leg. I say you can do it. Hey, maybe if you do a bad job I can get a real gnarly scar. That would be so wicked,” he whispered reverently, leaning back farther in his seat.

Peter let out a silent scream. “Okay,” he said, then ripped his mask off so that he could breathe more easily. “Okay,” he repeated. 

And he put in a row of raggedy stitches while Harley bit down so hard on his tongue to hold in a scream that he had to spit out a mouthful of blood once Peter was finished. 

“I’m so sorry,” Peter said weakly. 

Harley clapped a trembling hand to his chest and held the other out to Peter. 

Peter held up his two blood-caked hands and winced.

Harley made a grabby little motion, clearly not giving a shit that Peter was doused in his blood. 

“_All clear. Voldemort and crew are all disposed of. We’re coming up_,” came Tony’s voice across the comms. Peter could hear it from Bucky’s earpiece.

“Oh, thank God,” Bucky murmured. 

“We’re leaving now, Harls,” Peter whispered, burying his face in Harley’s hand. “You’re safe. We’re getting you out of here.”

Harley shot him a wan grin. “I knew y’would.”

\---

“Do I really _need_ painkillers?” Harley grunted through clenched teeth, sweat dripping down from his temples and tears gleaming against the rim of his eyelids. “Can’t you just, like, hit me real hard on the head?”

Bruce Banner gave him an unimpressed look. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, you do need painkillers.”

Harley sighed. “I hate needles.”

“You hate needles more than gunshot wounds?” asked May, eyebrows quirked, from where she sat in a chair next to Harley’s bed. 

Harley turned to her and she tutted, brushing his hair off of his forehead. 

“Stop fighting it, sweetheart,” she said softly. “Let us take care of you for once.”

Peter reached over and grabbed Harley’s hand, wedged between Harley’s hip and the hard plastic edge of the bed. (There was no way in heaven or high hell he was letting Harley out of arm’s reach after this. Not even for a minute.)

Harley scowled but held an arm straight out towards Bruce, as if miming _take me_. 

Tony sighed from the seat next to May, his eyes heavy with unmistakable guilt and his hands pulling incessantly at the strings of his sweatshirt. “You are unbearably dramatic.”

“Who, little ol’ me?” Harley said, turning firmly away from Bruce as he laid his arm flat and tourniqueted it so that he could inject the IV and medication. “I think I’ve earned a little drama after today, getting kidnapped by the most trustworthy man in America.”

“I still don’t understand how he let that happen,” Tony muttered, stubborn. 

“Wasn’t his fault,” Harley said through a wince as the needle slipped under his skin. 

Bruce quickly connected him to the medicine and gave the bag a little flick so it would flow smoothly into Harley’s veins. “That should knock you out fast.”

Harley turned to him. “Thanks, doc. I hate it.”

“You’re worse than Steve,” said Bruce emphatically, pointing at Harley. “I’m leaving. Give me a beep if you need me. It should work within a minute or two.”

“Hey, where are you going?” demanded Tony. “You can’t leave a patient who needs to be monitored!”

“Tony,” Bruce huffed, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I love you, but _please calm down_. You’re a hooligan. Jesus. He’s fine. It was a leg wound. The bullet didn’t puncture anything. Peter fixed him up. He’ll heal quickly.”

Tony looked like he wanted to argue. May grabbed him around the elbow and wrenched him to his feet. “C’mon, _Nino_,” she said. “We’re going to get coffee, and then you’re going to shower. You smell like metal and man sweat and I refuse to sit here at Harley’s bedside with you when you stink like that.”

Panic entered Tony’s eyes immediately. “No, no. I can’t leave.”

“Peter will be here,” May reminded him. 

“I don’t like it,” Tony muttered. “I don’t like it one bit.”

Harley reached out the hand that was weighed down with needles. “Go. You stinky,” he said. Something in his expression had relaxed, the pinched wrinkles around his eyes smoothed and some of the strain gone from his shoulders. 

Tony scowled at him, then turned to Peter. “Don’t let him do anything stupid. Don’t let him get up and walk around or something. Make him sleep.”

Peter drew a cross over his heart with his hand. “I promise.”

With one last guilt-ridden grimace from Tony and a kiss blown from May, Peter and Harley were left alone, the sound of the machines monitoring Harley’s vitals ringing out like a terrible, hellish chorus. 

“Hey,” said Harley, poking Peter’s bicep. 

Peter buried his face into Harley’s shirt so he wouldn’t have to meet his gaze. “Hey yourself.”

“Pete,” Harley said. 

“I’m sorry.”

“What?” Harley demanded, the heart monitor beeping a spike in his heart rate. “What the eff? Don’t go doing this whole blame thing that you always do, Peter. Don’t you even _dare_ thinkin’bout it. I’m totally okay.” Harley stopped suddenly, just as his words began to slur together. “Hey, are _you_ okay? You’re not hiding an injury or something, right? You wouldn’t do that today, would you? Because I may be a little stoned and bloodless but I can still beat you up so bad.”

Peter squished his face further into Harley’s chest, squirming until his ear was pressed directly above Harley’s heart. “If I had found you sooner…”

“Pete. I was gone for, like, forty-five minutes, total. From the moment Steve got magicked ‘til we were’n the quinjet. It doesn’ get much faster th’n that.”

Peter sighed. “Go to sleep, Harley.”

“What? No! I’m not ev’n tired.”

Peter squinted one eye open so that he could shoot Harley an unimpressed look, taking in the visible struggle Harley was engaged in just to keep his eyes open. Repeatedly they fluttered shut, only for Harley to blink intensely and wrench them back  
open for a few strained seconds. His breathing was becoming slower and thicker beneath Peter’s head. 

“Hey,” said Harley. “Hey, d’you ev’n _know_ h’w m’ch I _love_ you? It’s. S’muuuuch, Petey.”

That wrought a- very begrudging- smile out of Peter. “You’re drunky,” he told Harley. “You must be so stoned to say that out loud with your words.”

“I love you,” Harley repeated. “So much tha’ my head’s gonna _esplode_ from it. And you _saved_ me. Good job. Y’did a real good job. Even fixed. Leg! You fixed leg. Thanks,” Harley said, swinging his limp arms around like clubs until they found themselves wrapped around Peter’s back. 

Peter couldn’t help but foster the guilt in his chest. “I did a terrible job with your leg. You’re gonna look like you got into a fight with a shark.”

“Shark bait, hoo-ha-ha,” Harley muttered. 

Peter snorted. “Go to sleep. You can sleep now.”

A frown crawled across Harley’s face. “Stay?”

Peter grabbed a fistful of Harley’s shirt and curled further into him. “Course. There's nowhere else I’d rather be.”

**Author's Note:**

> okay first of all, is anyone still there lmao
> 
> sound off if you still enjoy reading these because i feel like i'm boring you all to death and that is Not what i want to do to you.
> 
> are these too long??? i never mean for them to get this long but then i get going and suddenly it's 104 1.5-spaced pages long and im like *oops*
> 
> i question everything!!!! ahhhhhh!!!!!
> 
> boh, thank you for reading if you got to this point xoxo


End file.
